Gravitational Wave Physics Simulations on the AFRL CONDOR Supercomputer

该奖项支持一项研究计划，以了解和解决将特定引力波物理应用从16台索尼PlayStation 3(PS3)游戏机的原型集群扩展到目前可用的最大系统的挑战，该系统由纽约罗马的空军研究实验室(AFRL)建造。该系统名为AFRL秃鹰，使用1,716个PS3以及传统服务器和NVIDIA CUDA图形处理器，实现500 TFLOPS的计算能力。通过最近与AFRL达成的CRADA协议，PI可以不受限制地访问这个大型系统。这项工作的目标之一是对超大质量黑洞捕获小黑洞(比如太阳质量)的过程进行建模，这是理论引力波物理领域的一个重要问题，也是天基探测器引力波的潜在来源。目前，利用视频游戏技术的力量进行科学高性能计算是相当有兴趣的。PI的原型集群成功地用于科学计算，与传统的基于CPU的集群相比，在性能/美元和性能/瓦特等指标上显示出数量级的增长。该项目所使用的应用程序的成功扩展将立即影响这些应用程序实现的引力波科学。此外，在AFRL秃鹰这样的大型系统上实现良好的可伸缩性所获得的经验和经验将是极其宝贵的，并可能适用于其他问题和系统。可能通过该项目开发的并行性或优化方法也可能适用于其他问题和领域。结果和结果将发表在研究期刊和会议上，并通过PI的研究网站公开提供。此外，这是一个对物理和工程专业的学生都非常有吸引力的项目。受资助的研究生将学习超级计算的各个方面，包括如何在AFRL秃鹰等大型超级计算机上处理和解决与扩展相关的挑战。

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.