State-of-the-art models produce reliable explosions in 2D with a neutrino heating mechanism, but given the extraordinary computational cost of three-dimensional simulations (one model costs ~100 million hours of total compute time), the jury is still out on if these models will explode with no imposed spatial symmetry. Despite this, it's looking more and more like we understand the fundamental principles of the mechanism, and a lack of a supernova in one of these 3D supernova models is more likely to be the result of an unjustified approximation or technical oversight in the numerical analysis.

HPC is being forced to use off-the-shelf components. There is the funding for R&D of application-specific hardware.