Advances in Supercomputing for the Modeling of Atomic Processes in Plasmas

An overview will be given of recent atomic and molecular collision methods developed to take advantage of modern massively parallel computers. The focus will be on direct solutions of the time-dependent Schroedinger equation for simple systems using large numerical lattices, as found in the time-dependent close-coupling method, and for configuration interaction solutions of the time-independent Schroedinger equation for more complex systems using large numbers of basis functions, as found in the R-matrix with pseudo-states method. Results from these large scale calculations are extremely useful in benchmarking less accurate theoretical methods and experimental data. To take full advantage of future petascale and exascale computing resources, it appears that even finer grain parallelism will be needed.