SCREMS: Next Generation Parallel Computing Infrastructure for Numerical Relativity

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The Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation in the Schoolof Mathematical Sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology willpurchase a computer cluster which will be dedicated to the support ofresearch in the mathematical sciences. The equipment will be used forseveral research projects including in particular: the development ofnew, highly efficient, extremely high accuracy numerical algorithms tosolve the non-linear equations of general relativisticmagnetohydrodynamics (GRMHD). Magnetohydrodynamics represents adifficult challenge numerically due to the small-scale featuresintroduced by shocks in the fluid material and the magnetic fields.The problem can only be tackled efficiently using higher-order finitedifferencing methods (greater than fourth-order), including thosedesigned to evolve conservative systems, in conjunction withhighly-scalable adaptive-mesh-refinement (AMR) algorithms. The nextgeneration of multi-core processors are expected to have up to 32individual cores in the near future, and computational nodes with morethan 64 cores will soon follow. The challenge, then, is toefficiently parallelize the algorithm on these many-core systems. Wewill do this by optimizing inter and intra-node communication via acombination of openMP and MPI. The proposed cluster, which willinitially have 12 nodes (upgraded to 16 in year 2), each containing 8cores and 16 GB of RAM, interconnected with a high-speed, low-latencyInfiniBand network, will model these future clusters so that we candevelop new algorithms. This cluster will act as the central workhorsefor developing numerical techniques and performing GRMHD simulationsfor the next 3 years.Partial support for this award is from PHY, Gravitational Physics program.