MRI: Acquisition of a Computing Cluster for Gravitational-Wave and Multimessenger Astrophysics in the Era of LIGO Detections

该MRI奖项支持罗切斯特理工学院（RIT）计算相对论和引力中心（CCRG）的一组研究人员获得、部署和维护一个新的最先进的计算集群GreenPrairie，用于引力物理学、相对论天体物理学、先进的高性能计算和科学可视化的前沿研究。GreenPrairie将成为CCRG的主要计算主力，它将直接支持RIT四个部门和三个学院的本科生和研究生，博士后研究人员和教师的研究。它将促进天体物理学，数学建模和计算机科学三个研究生课程的发展，并支持代表数值相对论，引力波形源建模和相对论天体物理学的几个大型社区合作的研究。该集群的科学可视化将用于支持一个受资助的REU多信使天体物理学项目，以及RIT国家聋人技术研究所向聋人和听力障碍社区推广科学的项目。 该集群还将通过实地考察和年度社区范围的公共展览，成为科学、数学和计算方面的公共宣传活动的载体。GreenPrairie由一个1296核、高速、大内存计算机集群组成，附带768 TB的存储空间，并将被安置在CCRG的“黑洞实验室”计算机设施内。GreenPrairie的研究将集中在宇宙中一些最极端的现象上，最强的引力和磁场与超相对论物质和高能辐射相互作用，只能通过先进的大规模计算和可视化来研究。该集群将用于高级LIGO的关键天体物理源的及时模拟，该系统使用理论波形的信息来解释观测到的信号并确定天体物理源的性质。具体来说，该集群将用于模拟黑洞双星及其合并波形，跨越与先进LIGO和下一代探测器相关的整个参数空间，以及由引力波探测触发的快速响应模拟。该星团还将用于研究涉及近距离和/或合并的双黑洞系统的吸积问题，预计这些系统将通过当前和未来的天文观测（如LSST）在电磁频谱中进行观测。最后，集群将成为开发新的计算技术的试验平台，这些技术将允许有效计算涉及多种物理学的异构系统，这些物理学具有非常不同的长度尺度和多种进化方案。

This MRI award supports a team of researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology's (RIT) Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation (CCRG) to acquire, deploy, and maintain a new state-of-the art computational cluster, GreenPrairie, to be used in research at the frontiers of gravitational physics, relativistic astrophysics, advanced high-performance computation, and scientific visualization. GreenPrairie will be the main computational workhorse of the CCRG, and it will directly enable the research of undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty across four departments and three colleges at RIT. It will foster the growth of three graduate programs in astrophysics, mathematical modeling, and computer science, and support research on behalf of several large community-wide collaborations in numerical relativity, gravitational waveform source modeling, and relativistic astrophysics. Scientific visualizations from the cluster will be used to support a funded REU program on multi-messenger astrophysics, and programs at RIT's National Technical Institute for the Deaf to promote science to the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities. The cluster will also be a vehicle for public outreach events on science, mathematics, and computing through site visits and annual community-wide public exhibits.GreenPrairie consists of a 1296-core, high-speed, large-memory computer cluster, with 768 TB of attached storage, and will be housed within the "Black Hole Lab" computer facility at the CCRG. Research with GreenPrairie will focus on some of the most extreme phenomena in the universe, where the strongest gravitational and magnetic fields interact with ultra-relativistic matter and high-energy radiation, that can only be studied through advanced, large-scale computation and visualization. The cluster will be used for timely simulations of key astrophysical sources for advanced LIGO, which uses information from theoretical waveforms to interpret the observed signals and determine the nature of the astrophysical sources. Specifically, the cluster will be used to simulate black-hole binaries, and their merger waveforms, across the entire space of parameters relevant to advanced LIGO and next generation detectors, as well as fast response simulations triggered by gravitational wave detections. The cluster will also be used to study accretion problems involving close and/or merging binary black hole systems which are expected to be observable in the electromagnetic spectrum by current and future astronomical surveys, such as LSST. Finally, the cluster will be a testbed for developing novel computational techniques that will permit efficient computation of heterogeneous systems involving multiple kinds of physics with very different length scales, and multiple evolution schemes.