HPCwire: RIT Scientists Use Supercomputers to 'See' Black Holes

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

October 19, 2009

RIT Scientists Use Supercomputers to 'See' Black Holes

Time won on Blue Waters, Ranger supercomputers; plus grant to create cyberinfrastructure

Oct. 19 -- Scientists at Rochester Institute of Technology have won several grants to further extend their own supercomputer and make use of two of the fastest supercomputers in the world in their quest to "shine light" on black holes.

Since light cannot escape from the surface of a black hole, scientists rely upon computer algorithms to study the massive dark objects. Researchers in the Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation at RIT are using supercomputers on campus and across the country to simulate with mathematics and computer graphics what cannot be seen directly.

"It is a thrilling time to study black holes," says Manuela Campanelli, center director. "We're nearing the point where our calculations will be used to test out one of the last unexplored aspects of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, possibly confirming that it properly describes the strongest gravitational fields in the universe."

RIT mathematics professors Campanelli, Carlos Lousto, Yosef Zlochower and Joshua Faber and computer science professor Hans-Peter Bischof study the evolution of black holes and other objects using large-scale supercomputers. Their computer lab hosts "NewHorizons," a cluster consisting of 85 nodes with four processors each, connected via an Infiniband network that passes data at 10-gigabyte-per-second speeds.

Three National Science Foundation awards have brought the center's external funding total up to $2.9 million in the past three years. The awards -- plus time won on a top supercomputer -- will dramatically enhance the team's access to the most sophisticated computer power in the world:

The team recently won $85,000 from the National Science Foundation's Scientific Computing Research Environments for the Mathematical Sciences program to augment their computer power by nearly 50 percent with an extra 20 nodes, each containing eight processors. The additional power will help the team develop new algorithms and computational techniques for testing the General Theory of Relativity.
The RIT group was awarded 3.5 million CPU (computing processing units) hours on the "Ranger" supercomputer through the TeraGrid, the nation's premier resource for scientific computing, funded by the NSF and coordinated through the University of Chicago. Ranger, housed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center in Austin, is the eighth most powerful supercomputer in the world, according to the TOP500 List of supercomputer sites, a biannual ranking announced in June at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany. The RIT award represents the equivalent of using 400 of the computer's processors round-the-clock for an entire year.
RIT's Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation is one of two relativity groups that won an NSF Petascale Computing Resource Allocation grant reserving time on a "super-supercomputer" called "Blue Waters." The machine is scheduled to begin production in 2011 at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Blue Waters, which will consist of more than 200,000 processing cores, is expected to be the most powerful supercomputer in the world for open scientific research. The $40,000 award will support travel to the cluster facility in Champaign, Ill., and opportunities to collaborate with computer scientists designing the machine.
The CCRG team is helping to shape the next generation of supercomputer power by using available resources in novel ways and developing computational tools to enable new science. The NSF awarded RIT $300,000 as part of a collaborative research project to develop the Community Infrastructure for General Relativistic Hydrodynamics. Scientists will use the open toolkit and cyberinfrastructure to model black holes, neutron stars and accretion disks. RIT researchers Bischof, Campanelli, Faber, Lousto and Zlochower will work with their colleagues at Georgia Tech, Louisiana State University, Albert Einstein Institute and Oak Ridge National Laboratory to develop tools for understanding many of the most energetic events observed in astronomy, from millisecond-long bursts of gamma-rays to active galactic nuclei, that constantly emit more than a trillion suns' worth of energy.

"Computers are only going to get bigger and faster over the coming years," says Campanelli, "and with these grants and allocations, RIT's numerical relativity group should stay at the forefront of scientific computation for years to come."

About Rochester Institute of Technology

Rochester Institute of Technology is internationally recognized for academic leadership in computing, engineering, imaging technology, and fine and applied arts, in addition to unparalleled support services for students with hearing loss. Nearly 16,450 full- and part-time students are enrolled in more than 200 career-oriented and professional programs at RIT, and its cooperative education program is one of the oldest and largest in the nation. For two decades, U.S. News & World Report has ranked RIT among the nation's leading comprehensive universities. RIT is featured in The Princeton Review's 2009 edition of The Best 368 Colleges and in Barron's Best Buys in Education. The Chronicle of Higher Education recognizes RIT as a "Great College to Work For."

-----

Source: Rochester Institute of Technology

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

The ACM Turing Award goes to the creator of the modern personal computer; and Voltaire announces a mid-range InfiniBand switch and new technology that accelerates distributed applications. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Florida State Gives Virtual SMPs a Spin

The prospects for virtual SMP technology got another boost last month when Florida State University announced it had installed a new HPC system from 3Leaf Systems. The servers are being housed at the university's HPC facility and will be used across a range of scientific disciplines.
Read More...

HPC Powers Bobsled Team to Olympic Gold

For the first time in 62 years, the four-man Olympics bobsled team from the US captured the gold medal, setting a course world record in the process. The winning bobsled had some state-of-the-art engineering behind it, including CFD software from Exa Corporation. As it turned out, that software may have proved to be the margin of difference in the race.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

Gelsinger Stuns Analysts and Colleagues with Storage Pool Plan

Mar 15 | The Register | EMC's grand vision for unified global storage. Read more...

Cisco Containers Target Federal Market

Mar 15 | Data Center Knowledge | Company delivers UCS-container solution to NASA. Read more...

GP-GPUs: OpenCL Is Ready For The Heavy Lifting

Mar 11 | Linux Magazine | CUDA may be the rage, but OpenCL is a standard that has some features you may need. Read more...

Can Free Software Drive the Fourth Paradigm?

Mar 09 | Free Software Magazine | Data-driven computing will need open software. Read more...

Graphics Card Maker Turns to High-Performance Bioinformatics

Mar 09 | Bio-IT World | Tahoe Informatics founder eyes GPUs, CUDA software. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html