Gravitational Wave Physics Simulations on the AFRL CONDOR Supercomputer

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This award supports a research program to understand and to address the challenges associated to scaling specific gravitational wave physics applications from a prototype cluster of 16 Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) gaming consoles to the largest system now available, that built by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) in Rome, NY. This system, named AFRL CONDOR, makes use of 1,716 PS3s alongside traditional servers and Nvidia CUDA GPUs to achieve 500 TFLOPS of computing power. The PI has unrestricted access to this large system through a recently established CRADA agreement with AFRL. One of the specific gravitational wave physics applications that will be targeted in this work is one that models the process of the capture of a small (say, solar-mass) black hole by a supermassive black hole, an important problem in the area of theoretical gravitational wave physics, and a potential source of gravitational waves for space-based detectors.There is considerable current interest in harnessing the power of video gaming technology for scientific high-performance computing. The PI's prototype cluster was used successfully for scientific computation and demonstrated order-of-magnitude gains in metrics such as performance-per-dollar and performance-per-Watt as compared with traditional CPU-based clusters. Successful scaling up of the applications used for this project will immediately impact the gravitational wave science that these applications enable. In addition, the lessons learned and the experience gained associated to achieving good scaling on a large system like AFRL CONDOR will be extremely valuable and likely applicable to other problems and systems. Parallelism or optimization approaches that may be developed through this project may also find applicability in other problems and areas. The outcomes and results will be published in research journals and conferences and also made openly available though the PI's research website. In addition, this is a project that would be very attractive to both physics and engineering students. The supported graduate student will learn about various aspects of supercomputing, including how to approach and address challenges related to scaling on large supercomputers like AFRL CONDOR.