Mock Supernova Created by Supercomputer

[mickw]

A new view of supernovas — the spectacular explosions of dying stars — has come not from a telescope, but from a powerful supercomputer simulation.

The simulated supernova, revealed in cut-away layers in the rendering, grew out of an effort to develop faster ways to build high-fidelity computer models of complex phenomena in the real world.

Performing a single run of a current model of the explosion of a star on a home computer would be next to impossible — it would take more than three years just to download the data. So scientists instead use supercomputers, which can handle processing quadrillions of data points at a time

More:   http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/090731-supercomputer-supernova.html