We use the Blue Waters system to carry out large-scale first-principle modeling of light and medium-mass nuclei, including short-lived isotopes not yet accessible to experiment but key to understanding astrophysical processes that shape our universe and which are the focus of current and next-generation rare isotope experimental facilities. In our studies, we utilize an innovative theoretical framework for first-principle modeling of nuclear structure, dubbed symmetry-adapted no-core shell model, which is implemented as a hybrid MPI/OpenMP parallel computer code that scales well for hundreds of thousands of processors. The extremely large memory and computational power of the Blue Waters system allows us to model the intricate dynamics of atomic nuclei with a precision hitherto inaccessible to theory, thereby addressing some of the long-lasting challenges of importance to nuclear theory and experiment, as well as astrophysics.
