To help tell the story of how high performance computing is enabling truly “out of this world” discoveries, SC17 has released a new video that focuses on the role of high performance computers in the Nobel Prize-winning LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) collaboration. The just-announced prize was awarded for the discovery of gravitational waves, originally theorized 100 years ago by Albert Einstein in his general theory of relativity.
LIGO, funded by the National Science Foundation, uses incredibly sophisticated geographically-distributed laser detectors to find the elusive sounds in the universe that prove the existence of gravitational waves.
“We are only now beginning to hear the vibrations of space-time that are all around us—we just needed a better ear. And when we detect that, we’re detecting the vibrations of everything that has ever moved in the universe. This is real. This is really there, and we’ve never noticed it until now,” said Alan Weinstein Head, Caltech LIGO Laboratory Astrophysics Group and Professor of Physics, Caltech.
Click on the YouTube link below to see the video and please share with your colleagues:
Click the following link for more info on LIGO and the Nobel Prize.