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
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
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
