GFLASH is an expansion of the well known FLASH code designed to run on the PI2S2 Grid infrastructure of the COMETA consortium.
The new and original numerical modules developed in the framework of the PI2S2 project allow to simulate:

1) the interaction of supernova remnant (SNR) shocks with inhomogeneities of the interstellar medium;
2) the dynamics of SNRs expanding through the inhomogeneous and magnetized medium;
3) the explosion of nova outbursts in binary star systems;
4) the accretion phenomena occurring in young stellar objects;
5) the dynamics of protostellar jets propagating through the inhomogeneous circumstellar medium.
Additional computational modules have been implemented to handle the radiative losses from optically thin plasma (with different metal abundances), the heating mechanism of stellar chromospheres, the thermal conduction, and the evolution of fractional ionization in stellar atmospheres.
GFLASH has been used as prototype of High Performance Computing (HPC) applications and has allowed to set-up the grid infrastructure and to make it suitable for HPC. Thanks to this activity, the consortium is considered a pathfinder in porting HPC applications to Grid.
GFLASH has been extensively used on the PI2S2 grid infrastructure and has allowed to study:
- The importance of magnetic-field-oriented thermal conduction in the interaction of SNR shocks with interstellar clouds;
- The dynamics of fragments (shrapnels) of ejected during supernova explosions;
- The three-dimensional structure of the asymmetric blast wave from the 2006 outburst of RS Ophiuchi and its X-ray emission;
- The dynamics and energetic of the interaction of an accretion stream impacting onto the surface of a protostar;
- The origin of the X-ray emission associated with protostellar jets and the dynamics of pulsed jets.
The team developing and upgrading GFLASH in the framework of the PI2S2 project benefits of international collaborations with researches of the University of Chicago (USA), European Space Agency, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (USA), Naval Research Laboratory (USA), Thüringer Landessternwarte Tautenburg (Germany), Institute for Applied Problems in Mechanics and Mathematics, Lviv (Ukraine).

Experiment: MHD numerical code for astrophysical plasmas

Software requirements:

A Fortran 90 compiler and a C compiler.
The Message-Passing Interface (MPI) library.
The Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) library for output files.
The GNU make utility, gmake.
Python language, version 1.5.2 or later.