A new astronomy has arrived with the recent detection of gravitational waves. Modeling of sources of gravitational radiation is more than ever a critical necessity in order to interpret the observations. The project Einstein Toolkit has as overarching mission to provide the scientific community with a sustainable software platform of core computational tools for research focused on astrophysical systems endowed with complex multi-scale/multi-physics properties which are governed by Einstein's equations of General Relativity. The central premise of the project Einstein Toolkit is to create a broad and vibrant community of users, a community where interdisciplinary collaborations are the norm and not the exception, a community driving advances in the next generation of high-performance computing cyberinfrastructure. The main objectives of the project Einstein Toolkit are: developing software tools for a radical increase in scientific productivity, achieving sustainability of the software ecosystem, addressing software engineering challenges, and the curation of data from general relativistic numerical simulations.
This project will achieve its goals through two major activity areas. Regarding the software ecosystem and its sustainability, the scheduler that handles the flow of tasks in a problem will be redesigned to be more versatile and to improve its performance. In addition new software modules will be developed to broaden the choices of initial data and matter sources, as well as modules for problems requiring a high degree of experimentation with equations and numerical methodologies. A new general relativistic magneto-hydrodynamics code will also be integrated in the Einstein Toolkit. The second activity area involves building a simulation data repository. The repository will allows user to compare results, contribute data, test innovative ideas and algorithms for gravitational wave data analysis, and to explore or discover new phenomena in sources of gravitational radiation. The broader impact effort in the project Einstein Toolkit will be organized in two major activity areas. The first involves community integration. The project will support a program of ease-of-use on-line tutorials and a workshops/tutorial series. The program will help small groups or individual investigators familiarizing with the codes and modules in the toolkit as well as pathways to become a developer. Regarding outreach and education, the project Einstein Toolkit will enable interdisciplinary training of students and postdocs in numerical relativity, computational astrophysics and computer science. The effort will includes developing a teaching resources bank for educational activities involving computational topics applied to gravitational physics and astrophysics. The educational resources will be suitable for computational courses in general relativity and astrophysics at both the graduate and undergraduate level.
This project is supported by the Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure in the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering and the Physics Division in the Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences.
