MRI-R2: Acquisition of a Compute Cluster for High-Fidelity Simulations of Gravitational Wave Sources -- Facilitating LIGO and Enabling Multi-Messenger Astronomy

该奖项是根据2009年《美国复苏和再投资法案》(公法111-5)提供资金的。该奖项使获得一个计算机集群成为可能，从而能够模拟天文系统的开创性模型，以引力波形、中微子签名和电磁信号的形式为多信使天文学提供高保真、可靠的定量预测。引力波是时空结构中的涟漪，以光速在宇宙中传播。美国国家科学基金会资助的激光干涉仪引力波天文台(LIGO)正在寻找这些波，这些波编码了它们来源的其他无法获取的细节。对这些来源的电磁和中微子观测将丰富和补充这些新信息，使多信使天文学成为现实。已经开发了代码，以利用可用计算能力的增长来改进、准确地模拟几个潜在的引力波来源，包括包含黑洞和/或中子星的双星系统，以及大质量恒星的坍塌产生超新星。该集群将位于加州理工学院高级计算研究中心，最初将由大约2000个核心和大约100 TB的磁盘组成，到项目结束时将升级到大约325 TB。这台机器将由加州理工大学/康奈尔数值相对论合作小组、加州理工计算天体物理学小组以及普林斯顿大学、马里兰大学和路易斯安那州立大学的合作者使用。集群将专注于需要快速周转时间的模拟、要在(周转缓慢但大得多的)TeraGrid/Lab资源上运行的代码的开发/测试、以及在TeraGrid/Lab机器以及集群本身上获得的结果的分析/可视化。研究生、本科生和博士后学者将参与研究，并接受使用集群的培训。该群组将促进七个机构之间的广泛研究合作，并将显著提高LIGO未来的科学产出。在这一组群上进行的模拟结果将通过网络演示、公开演讲、文章和电影向所有领域的科学家和公众传播。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). The award enables the acquisition of a computer cluster to allow the simulation of groundbreaking models of astronomical systems to yield high-fidelity, robust, quantitative predictions for multi-messenger astronomy in the form of gravitational waveforms, neutrino signatures, and electromagnetic signals. Gravitational waves (GWs) are ripples in the structure of spacetime that propagate across the universe at the speed of light. The NSF-funded Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) is searching for these waves, which encode otherwise inaccessible details of their sources. This new information will be enriched and complemented by electromagnetic and neutrino observations of those sources, making multi-messenger astronomy a reality. Codes have been developed to take advantage of the growth in available computing power to allow improved, accurate modeling of several potential sources of gravitational waves, including double star systems containing black holes and/or neutron stars and the collapse of massive stars to yield supernovae. The cluster, to be located at Caltech's Center for Advanced Computing Research, will consist of approximately 2000 cores and approximately 100 TeraBytes (TB) of disk to start, with upgrades to approximately 325 TB by the end of the project. The machine be will be used by the Caltech/Cornell numerical relativity collaboration and by the Caltech Computational Astrophysics Group and collaborators at Princeton University, the University of Maryland and Louisiana State University. The cluster will concentrate on simulations where rapid turnaround time is required, on the development/testing of code to be run on (slow-turnaround, but much larger) TeraGrid/Lab resources, and on analysis/visualization of results obtained on TeraGrid/Lab machines as well as on the cluster itself. Graduate and undergraduate students and postdoctoral scholars will participate in the research and be trained to use the cluster. The cluster will foster extensive research collaboration across seven institutions and will significantly enhance the future scientific output of LIGO. The results of simulations performed on this cluster will be disseminated to scientists in all fields and to the general public, via web presentations, public lectures, articles, and movies.