Home > Archives > Additional Archives > Ed Seidel   Ed Seidel Max-Planck-Institut-fuer-Gravitationsphysik Potsdam, Germany http://jean-luc.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ http://www.aei-potsdam.mpg.de/ Using Supercomputers to Collapse Gravitational Waves, Collide Black Holes, and study other Cataclysms   Einstein's equations of general relativity govern such exotic phenomena as black holes, neutron stars, and gravitational waves. Unfortunately they are among the most complex in physics, and require very large scale computational power --- which we are just on the verge of achieving --- to solve. I will describe the structure of these equations, and the worldwide effort to develop advanced computational tools to solve them in their full generality for the first time since they were written down nearly a century ago. These tools are designed to exploit parallel computational resources wherever they are, provide advanced capabilities such as remote steering, visualization, and mesh refinement capabilities, for a variety of scientific and engineering applications. I also discuss applications of these tools to the study of black hole collisions, considered to be promising sources of observable gravitational waves that may soon be seen for the first time by the worldwide network of gravitational wave detectors (LIGO, VIRGO, GEO, and others) currently under construction, and show movies of large scale simulations of black hole formation and black hole collisions.
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