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HPC & AI Wall StreetApril 19 — On 10 April 2019 the first-ever image of a black hole was unveiled. This once-in-a-lifetime achievement would not have happened without the support of a global team of dedicated scientists, and of European supercomputers.
During a live-streamed press conference in Brussels, spectators were treated to a short video zooming in on galaxy M87 to end with a view of the supermassive black hole that exists at its centre and is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun. BlackHoleCam Scientists (https://blackholecam.org/) as part of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Consortium (https:/
Prof. Dr. Luciano Rezzolla, Chair of Theoretical Astrophysics at the Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany, and one of the principal investigators (PI) of BlackHoleCam (https:/
In addition to the telescopes, the team used supercomputing resources to explore theoretically the various aspects of this discovery and understand the properties of the black hole. The German Tier-0 systems SuperMUC, hosted by LRZ in Garching, HazelHen, hosted by HLRS in Stuttgart, and the LOEWE cluster in CSC in Frankfurt, were directly employed in these calculations. SuperMUC and HazelHen are part of the PRACE Research Infrastructure that supports excellent science and engineering in Europe (www.prace-ri.eu/
“Two aspects of our work that would have been impossible without supercomputers: the direct simulations that first produce the plasma dynamics near a black hole and subsequently the appearance of the “shadow” from a black hole, and the data reduction needed to turn the huge amount of interferometric data from the radiotelescopes into an image,” explains Rezzolla.
When using world-class HPC systems, the need for efficient algorithms and skilled scientific programmers increases significantly. Katie Bouman, who is an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology’s computing and mathematical sciences department, was one of the talented scientists on the EHT team. The image showing her excitement at the first viewing of the image has gone viral, and has given a young and female face to universe science.
“In international projects with diverse teams of highly skilled and motivated people, the best scientific results are achieved. This project, which combines the most advanced technology with the finest theoretical supercomputer simulations, is a good example of that,” Rezzolla added.
PRACE is proud to have Luciano Rezzolla as a Member of its Access Committee, the body that gives advice to the Board of Directors concerning the allocation of resources of the RI (www.prace-ri.eu/organisation/)
The image opens new windows onto the study of black holes, their event horizons, and gravity, and PRACE will continue to support excellent research in this field via its Call for Proposals for Project Access. To date PRACE has supported 17 such projects, providing them with more than 780 million core hours combined. The topic is also featured in the Scientific Case for Computing in Europe 2018 – 2026 (www.prace-ri.eu/
PRACE supports diversity and inclusivity in HPC through its affiliation with Women in HPC (www.prace-ri.eu/
About BlackHoleCam
BlackHoleCam is a EU-funded project to finally image, measure and understand astrophysical black holes. Our research will test fundamental predictions of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity (GR). The BlackHoleCam team members are active partners of the global Event Horizon Telescope Consortium. BHCam is a project funded through a “Synergy Grant” awarded by the European Research Council (ERC) to a team of European astrophysicists, in partnership with the Event Horizon Telescope project and other international partners.
Source: PRACE
