Sunday, October 17, 2010

Using supercomputers to study black holes


Stelios Kazantzidis from Ohio State University is working to unlock some of the mysteries surrounding the formation of vast galaxies and the evolution of massive black holes with his own large constellation of silicon wafers.

Over the last year, two research teams led by Kazantzidis have used what would average out to nearly 1,000 computing hours each day on the parallel high-performance computing systems of the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC). To develop their detailed models and resulting simulations, Kazantzidis and his colleagues tapped OSC's flagship system, the Glenn IBM Cluster 1350, which features more than 9,600 Opteron cores and 24 terabytes of memory.


Kazantzidis believes simulations of the formation of binary supermassive black holes have the potential to open a new window into astrophysical and physical phenomena that cannot be studied in other ways and might help to verify general relativity, one of the most fundamental theories of physics.


Full article:  http://www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=10327

19 comments:

  1. Pretty Interesting, i hope they get it working

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  2. Yeaaaaghhhh too cool! It's awesome to be living in these amazing times! :D

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  3. It's mind blowing how much we're starting to know about the universe.

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  4. If I had a supercomputer, I don't know for what I'd use it, lol, nice info bro!

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  5. That's some hard core science, yo

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  6. Throwing supercomputers into black holes seems kind of a waste of money. Can't we just throw old computer in instead?

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  7. I wonder what Left 4 Dead would play like on one of these computers

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  8. Very cool :)

    http://vanstino.blogspot.com/

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  9. jesus! 24 TB? 9600 cores?

    Shit, it better be able to speak with other life forms with that power.

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