Manuela Campanelli, director of the Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation (CCRG), received word that she will be receiving a NASA's award of $1.5 million over 3 years to start a new Theoretical and Computational Astrophysics Network (TCAN) binary neutron star post-merger simulation program entitled, “Advancing Computational Methods to Understand the Dynamics of Ejection, Accretion, Winds and Jets in Neutron Star Mergers.” The project will be lead from RIT and will have collaboration nodes at Johns Hopkins University (site PI Julian Krolik), NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (site PI Jeremy Schnittman), and University of West Virginia (site PI Zach Etienne). Up to this point, TCANs have only been awarded to major R1 institutions.

Additionally, the team lead by Campanelli, S.C.Noble (U. Tulsa, NASA GSFC) and Krolik were awarded 163.2 million CPU hours on the Blue Waters super computer at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to be used before the end of March 2019 to study Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) simulations of accreting supermassive binary black holes (SMBBHs) entitled, “Photons from Binary Black Hole Inspirals.” Such a large allocation of time on the Blue Waters system will set the stage for the SMBBH and BNS programs to be successful on new exascale supercomputers as they come online in the next few years.