Black Hole simulations and High Performance Computing

Date: Friday 20 April 2012
Time: 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Location: Room 701, Rutherford Building
Contact: For further information regarding this event, please contact Rosalie Reilly by sending email to rosalie.reilly@canterbury.ac.nz or by calling 7404
Audience: The general public

Dr. Celine Cattoen
BlueFern High Performance Computing Centre

Black Hole simulations and High Performance Computing

Gravitational waves are one of the many phenomena predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity that are still to be observed. Numerical Relativity is the branch of General Relativity that studies simulations of relativistic binaries (black holes, neutron stars) and their associated gravitational waves. Since 2005, the field of Numerical Relativity has experienced many breakthroughs, with full inspiral-merger-ringdown simulations now possible. One of the main goals is to provide very accurate templates of gravitational waves for ground-based and space-based interferometers.
I will give an overview of the recent progress and the diversity of the numerical methods and strategies to solve Binary Black Hole simulations. In particular, I will also cover in a little more detail some of my work on using the Spectral Element Method (SEM) for Black Hole simulations. More precisely, a singular Schwarszchild black hole evolution is used as a test case with the "BSSN" formulation of the Einstein equations and moving punctures. The spectral element method is highly parallelizable and is ideal for running simulations on supercomputers such as the new facilities at BlueFern which will also be briefly introduced.

Bibliography: Celine completed her engineering degree in applied mathematics from the French National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA, Toulouse, France). She first came to New Zealand as an exchange student and then completed a MSci and PhD at Victoria University of Wellington with Prof Matt Visser, focusing on General Relativity and Cosmology. In 2009, she moved to Canada as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta, and discovered the joys of High Performance Computing when getting access to the national Canadian supercomputing facilities (Westgrid, Compute Canada). In October last year she moved to Christchurch and joined the BlueFern team at the University of Canterbury, which is part of the New Zealand National supercomputing facilities (NeSI).