The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) forms part of a world-wide network of gravitational-wave observatories poised to explore the Universe using gravitational waves. The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment uses colliding beams of high-energy particles to explore conditions just after the Big Bang and understand the matter-antimatter asymmetry seen in the universe today. Both of these fundamental science projects need massive amounts of computing to accomplish their scientific goals. This award supports the design, construction and commissioning of a high-throughput computing cluster for gravitational-wave astronomy and high-energy physics. Scientists from the Syracuse Gravitational-wave Group will use the cluster to develop sensitive data-analysis algorithms which will enable the direct detection of gravitational waves with the Advanced LIGO detectors and will allow us to extract the astrophysical information encoded in the detected signals. Members of the Syracuse High Energy Physics Group will use the instrument to search LHCb data for physics beyond our current understanding of fundamental particles, and to design the next generation of b-physics detectors.
Postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students in the Syracuse gravitational-wave and high-energy physics groups will be involved in the instrument development and the research enabled by this award, gaining valuable training in cutting-edge computational skills. The instrument developed through this award will establish a LIGO Tier-2 compute center at Syracuse University. This facility will be available to all members of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, a large, diverse organization with many members from minority-serving institutions and underrepresented groups. This award will further develop the nation's cyberinfrastructure by enabling collaboration between two physics communities which are dependent on high-throughput computing to accomplish their scientific goals. The cluster will be housed in the new Syracuse University Green Data Center, stimulating public interest in the instrument, as well as astronomy, astrophysics and high-energy physics.
This award funded the construction and operation of supercomputer for use in two areas of physics that require very large computers to answer fundamental questions about the universe: gravitational-wave physics and high-energy physics. Gravitational waves are produced by violent events in the distant universe, such as the collision of black holes or explosions of supernovas. The waves radiate across the universe at the speed of light. While Albert Einstein predicted the existence of these waves in 1916 in his general theory of relativity, it has taken decades to develop the technology to detect them. The Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) is currently under construction with funding from the National Science Foundation. Once Advanced LIGO is operational, scientists expect to make to first discoveries of gravitational waves. Before they can use LIGO to detect gravitational waves, scientists must figure out what the gravitational waves look like and how to extract them from LIGO's data stream. It takes massive amounts of computer power and data storage capacity to analyze LIGO data against all of the possible gravitational wave models. The supercomputer funded by this award is being used to develop the models and algorithms needed to detect gravitational waves with LIGO and, ultimately, to use LIGO to open a new window on the universe. During the three years of this project, over 20 scientific papers have been written by LIGO scientists using the supercomputer. These papers range from searching for gravitational waves from gamma-ray bursts, the most energetic explosions seen by telescopes, to understanding how the "spin" of a black hole can affect the gravitational waves emitted as two black holes collide. The supercomputer continues to be used for gravitational-wave research. A quarter of the supercomputer is devoted to the high-energy physics. The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment uses B-mesons to explore conditions just after the Big Bang and explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry seen in the universe today. The LHCb experiment is devoted to searches of new types of forces in decays of heavy quarks (b and c) and a lepton (tau). The LHCb experiment also has a wide impact on other topics in particle physics, for example studies on exotic hadronic states with four-quarks, Quarkonia, light hadron spectroscopy, production processes in p-p collisions. The supercomputer has been used for activities related to the analysis of LHCb data collected in 2011-12. Fifteen scientific publications have been written by LHCb users of the computer, with more on the way. The supercomputer is also used for simulations of upgrades to the LHCb experiment planned for 2018. The upgraded LHCb detector will have a substantially increased sensitivity compared to the present experiment, therefore a greater discovery potential. Installing and maintaining the very different software needed by gravitational-wave and high-energy physicists was a challenging aspect of this project. Together, the scientists participating in this award developed and used "virtual machine" technologies, which allows their analyses to co-exist on the same computer. This technology is an important proof-of-concept for "cloud computing," which could make substantial additional computing resources available to a wide range of scientists.
