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A new Penn State computational cluster, known as Pleiades, recently
was ranked 156th among the most powerful computer systems in the
world on the Top 500 Supercomputers list. The cluster is dedicated
to the analysis of data from the Laser
Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a facility supported by the National
Science Foundation (NSF) that is designed to detect gravitational waves
for use as a new tool for making astronomical discoveries. The
Pleiades cluster was built by Lee Samuel Finn, professor of Physics,
Astronomy, and Astrophysics and director of the Penn
State Center for Gravitational Wave Physics, in partnership with Penn State’s
Information Technology Services (ITS) office.
Scientists now are
anticipating the first detection of gravitational waves with the
imminent completion of LIGO and other new instruments. Pleiades,
which contains 170 servers and operates with the performance of
over 700 typical desktop workstations all working together, will
be used by LIGO researchers at Penn State along with other members
of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration to explore and analyze data
from LIGO and other gravitational-wave detectors world-wide.
“Gravitational
waves are intriguing to astronomers as a tool for peering through
clouds of gas and dust to see directly into the core of collapsing
stars, deep into the heart of colliding galaxies, and back to the
earliest moments of the universe,” explains
Finn, who has supervised the development of much of the scientific
data-analysis software for the LIGO project. “Penn State is
deeply involved in the quest to detect gravitational waves and to
open the frontier of this new field of astronomy.”
As a world
leader in the effort to detect gravitational waves (literally vibrations
in the fabric of space and time) Finn believes that, although the
challenge of gravitational-wave detection is great, the rewards
are far greater, including the prospect of a new kind of astronomy
in which the signals from stars are dim but the signals from black
holes are bright. Pleiades will enhance these studies, according
to Finn, who says, “while there is certainly room
to be more clever in how we search for gravitational waves, right
now we are very much limited by the need for more computing power,
which Pleiades provides.”
Currently, the Pleiades cluster
uses a gigabit-speed Ethernet network as its primary network
interconnect, with which it has attained over 870 gigaflops of
peak performance. However, it is already being upgraded to include
a high-speed interconnect technology (known as InfiniBand), according
to ITS developers, which is expected to improve the cluster’s
peak performance to over 1.4 teraflops—making
it among the top 100 machines in the nation.
The Pleiades cluster
is part of the International
Virtual Data Grid Laboratory (iVDGL),
an international computational laboratory of unprecedented
scale and scope, comprised of heterogeneous computing and storage
resources across the world, linked by high-speed network and operated
as a single system for the purpose of interdisciplinary experimentation
in grid-enabled, data-intensive scientific computing.
Lee Samuel
Finn, Hannah Williams, Heather Herzog, Vigay Agarwala, and Barbara
K. Kennedy
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