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

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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.