Background

Austin is a post-doc in the Scientific Computing Group. He is a member of the FLASH CAAR project to efficiently utilize modern HPC architectures to study supernovae and their nucleosynthetic products by bridging the gap between simulation and observation. This work will provide context for other experimental and observational research in nuclear astrophysics, and ultimately, improve our understanding of the origins of the heavy elements in nature.

Before coming to ORNL, Austin was a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab where he worked on extending simulations of the supernova explosion mechanism to observable epochs as part of the Exascale Computing Project. He received his Ph.D. in Physics with an Interdisciplinary Graduate Minor in Computational Science in August 2015, from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. For his Ph.D. research, Austin studied the topics of computational and nuclear astrophysics in the context of massively parallel, core-collapse supernova (CCSN) simulations. As part of this effort, Austin developed new methods to analyze the CCSN nucleosynthesis calculations and established a framework for tasking GPUs in solvers for the neutrino transport and reaction kinetics components of future CCSN simulations.

Education

2015
University of Tennessee
Physics
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
2012
University of Tennessee
Physics
Master of Science (M.S.)
2009
Murray State University
Engineering Physics/Mathematics & Statistics
Bachelor of Science (B.S.)

R&D Activities Contributions

Center for Accelerated Application Readiness (CAAR) - In preparation for next-generation supercomputer Summit, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) selected 13 partnership projects into its Center for Accelerated Application Readiness (CAAR)…

Publications

2017
Harris, J. Austin, W. Raphael Hix, Merek A. Chertkow, C. T. Lee, Eric J. Lentz, and O. E. Bronson Messer. "Implications for Post-Processing Nucleosynthesis of Core-Collapse Supernova Models with Lagrangian Particles." Astrophysical Journal 843 (2017): 2. doi:10.3847/1538-4357/aa76de
2016
Bruenn, Stephen W., Eric J. Lentz, W. Raphael Hix, Anthony Mezzacappa, J. Austin Harris, O. E. Bronson Messer, Eirik Endeve, John M. Blondin, Merek A. Chertkow, Eric J. Lingerfelt, Pedro Marronetti, and Konstantin N. Yakunin. "Development of Explosions in Axisymmetric Ab Initio Core-Collapse Supernova Simulations of 12-25 M⊙ Stars." Astrophysical Journal 818 (2016): 123. doi:10.3847/0004- 637X/818/2/123
2015
Lentz, Eric J., Stephen W. Bruenn, W. Raphael Hix, Anthony Mezzacappa, O. E. Bronson Messer, Eirik Endeve, John M. Blondin, J. Austin Harris, Pedro Marronetti, and Konstantin N. Yakunin. "Three-dimensional Core-collapse Supernova Simulated Using a 15 M⊙ Progenitor." Astrophysical Journal Letters 807 (2015): L31. doi:10.1088/2041-8205/807/2/L31
2014
Dong, Tingxing, Azzam Haidar, Piotr Luszczek, J. Austin Harris, Stanimire Tomov, and Jack Dongarra. "LU Factorization of Small Matrices: Accelerating Batched DGETRF on the GPU." Paper presented at 16th IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications: HPCC 2014, Paris, France, August 20–22, 2014. doi:10.1109/HPCC.2014.30
2013
Guidry, Mike W. and J. Austin Harris. "Explicit Integration of Extremely-Stiff Reaction Networks: Quasi-Steady-State Methods." Computational Science & Discovery 6 (2013): 015002. doi:10.1088/1749-4699/6/1/015002