Rapid Award to assist LIGO in the discovery of new Gravitational Wave Transients

Eliu Huerta Escudero, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

Roland Haas, Eliu Huerta Escudero, Mahendra Roopa, Charalampos Markakis, Stuart Anderson, Edgar Fajardo Hernandez, Stephen Taylor, Vedant Puri, Derek Glennon, Yufeng Luo, Hongyu Shen, Sibo Wang, Adam Rebei, Aaron Saxton, Shawn Rosofsky, Zixin Huang, Michael F O'Boyle, Satya Mohapatra, Dhara Mehta, Rui Lan, Jiaxi Nie, Iain Carpenter, Dongwei Shi, Anushri Gupta, Zhizhen Zhao, Alex Schwing, Zhuo Chen, Vishnuteja R Chavva, Sarah Habib, Zeran Zhu

The detection of gravitational waves (GWs) with the advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (aLIGO) has ushered in a revolution in astrophysics. The LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) has confirmed the existence of ultra compact objects that are consistent with the expected properties of black holes (BHs), as predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Furthermore, this revolutionary discovery have provided conclusive evidence that stellar mass binary black holes (BBHs) form and coalescence within a Hubble time.

Based on the detection rate reported, and aLIGO’s improved sensitivity with respect to the first observing run, we expect to detect several binary BH mergers and possibly one binary NS (BNS) merger in LIGO’s ongoing second discovery campaign.

To leverage High Performance Computing (HPC) resources for High Throughput Computing (HTC) via containers, an NCSA-led team with key scientists from the San Diego Supercomputing Center and LIGO Lab at Caltech, built and deployed the first computational framework that connects Blue Waters, the NSF-supported, leadership-class supercomputer operated by NCSA, to the LIGO Data Grid (LDG) via Open Science Grid (OSG) technology, and the use of Shifter to containerize LIGO’s workflow software. This enabled a seamless connection between Blue Waters and the LDG.

This framework is specifically tailored to address on-demand bursts of computing to match potential new detections, as well as novel investigations over existing data, both of which will lead to new and detailed understanding of gravitational wave sources that would otherwise remain inaccessible. Through this proposal, we request computational resources to carry out a pressing on-demand analysis of LIGO data.