Award Abstract # 1550551
SI2-SSI: Collaborative Research: Einstein Toolkit Community Integration and Data Exploration

NSF Org: OAC
Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC)
Recipient: LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY
Initial Amendment Date: July 11, 2016
Latest Amendment Date: May 27, 2021
Award Number: 1550551
Award Instrument: Continuing Grant
Program Manager: Varun Chandola
OAC
 Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC)
CSE
 Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
Start Date: July 1, 2016
End Date: August 31, 2022 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $449,470.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $449,470.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2016 = $224,735.00
FY 2017 = $74,911.00

FY 2018 = $74,911.00

FY 2019 = $74,913.00
History of Investigator:
  • Steven Brandt (Principal Investigator)
    sbrandt@cct.lsu.edu
  • Peter Diener (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Frank Loffler (Former Principal Investigator)
  • Steven Brandt (Former Co-Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: Louisiana State University
202 HIMES HALL
BATON ROUGE
LA  US  70803-0001
(225)578-2760
Sponsor Congressional District: 06
Primary Place of Performance: Louisiana State University & A&M College
LA  US  70803-2701
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
06
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): ECQEYCHRNKJ4
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s): COMPUTATIONAL PHYSICS,
Software Institutes
Primary Program Source: 01001617DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
01001718DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT

01001819DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT

01001920DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 7433, 7569, 8009, 8084, 9150
Program Element Code(s): 724400, 800400
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.070

ABSTRACT

A new astronomy has arrived with the recent detection of gravitational waves. Modeling of sources of gravitational radiation is more than ever a critical necessity in order to interpret the observations. The project Einstein Toolkit has as overarching mission to provide the scientific community with a sustainable software platform of core computational tools for research focused on astrophysical systems endowed with complex multi-scale/multi-physics properties which are governed by Einstein's equations of General Relativity. The central premise of the project Einstein Toolkit is to create a broad and vibrant community of users, a community where interdisciplinary collaborations are the norm and not the exception, a community driving advances in the next generation of high-performance computing cyberinfrastructure. The main objectives of the project Einstein Toolkit are: developing software tools for a radical increase in scientific productivity, achieving sustainability of the software ecosystem, addressing software engineering challenges, and the curation of data from general relativistic numerical simulations.

This project will achieve its goals through two major activity areas. Regarding the software ecosystem and its sustainability, the scheduler that handles the flow of tasks in a problem will be redesigned to be more versatile and to improve its performance. In addition new software modules will be developed to broaden the choices of initial data and matter sources, as well as modules for problems requiring a high degree of experimentation with equations and numerical methodologies. A new general relativistic magneto-hydrodynamics code will also be integrated in the Einstein Toolkit. The second activity area involves building a simulation data repository. The repository will allows user to compare results, contribute data, test innovative ideas and algorithms for gravitational wave data analysis, and to explore or discover new phenomena in sources of gravitational radiation. The broader impact effort in the project Einstein Toolkit will be organized in two major activity areas. The first involves community integration. The project will support a program of ease-of-use on-line tutorials and a workshops/tutorial series. The program will help small groups or individual investigators familiarizing with the codes and modules in the toolkit as well as pathways to become a developer. Regarding outreach and education, the project Einstein Toolkit will enable interdisciplinary training of students and postdocs in numerical relativity, computational astrophysics and computer science. The effort will includes developing a teaching resources bank for educational activities involving computational topics applied to gravitational physics and astrophysics. The educational resources will be suitable for computational courses in general relativity and astrophysics at both the graduate and undergraduate level.

This project is supported by the Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure in the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering and the Physics Division in the Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

Note:  When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).

Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.

Alessandra Feo, Roberto De Pietri, Francesco Maione and Frank Löffler "Modeling mergers of known galactic systems of binary neutron stars" Classical and Quantum Gravity , v.34 , 2016 , p.034001 10.1088/1361-6382/aa51fa
Roberto De Pietri, Alessandra Feo, José A. Font, Frank Löffler, Francesco Maione, Michele Pasquali, Nikolaos Stergioulas "Convective Excitation of Inertial Modes in Binary Neutron Star Mergers" Physical Review Letters , v.120 , 2018 10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.221101
Samuel Cupp, Steve R. Brandt, Roland Haas "The PreSync Project: Synchronization Automation in the Cactus Framework" Proceedings of the Pearc19 conference series , 2019

PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT

Disclaimer

This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.

This grant is part of a large collaborative effort supported by the NSF to develop the Einstein Toolkit community codes(einsteintoolkit.org). At Louisiana State University, the grant supported the research of a graduate student, Sam Cupp, and new infrastructure for the code based on the Cactus Framework. Specifically, the PreSync infrastructure, which automates the synchronizing of ghost zones (doi.org/10.1145/3219104.3229256). This work was further elaborated in Sam's thesis.

In 2019, the Einstein Toolkit accepted a second code into the collection of simulation codebases it maintains, the Self-Force code. The Self-Force code simulates extreme mass ratio inspiral (EMRI) collisions of black holes. Obtaining gravitational wave templates in this regime is not possible with more traditional codebases such as the original Cactus-based code (doi:10.5281/zenodo.7245853). Significant development of this codebase was carried out at LSU by Co-PI Diener and graduate student Sam Cupp.

Each year, the Einstein Toolkit consortium holds a workshop and a school for new users. In 2020, LSU hosted the workshop (https://www.cct.lsu.edu/Einsteintoolkitworkshop). Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was the first completely virtual workshop held by the Einstein Toolkit community.

During the other years, LSU provided the infrastructure for the hands-on portions of the workshops at other institutions and updated many of the training modules for new students. Along with UIUC, LSU has provided technical support and educational support during these events. At a lower level, this support is also made available throughout the year for students in countries around the world. An online server and collection of Docker images are maintained for this purpose.

Over the course of the grant, there were 9 Einstein Toolkit releases. 31 new components were integrated into the toolkit in this period, including the above-mentioned Selfforce1D code. In addition a code generating framework, NRPy+, and visualization and analysis codes, kuibit and POWER. We maintained a regular release cycle of two releases per year with 11 releases in 11 half-year release cycles.

A total of 169 publications resulted from research using the Einstein Toolkit, it supported more than 53 theses.

 

 


Last Modified: 02/23/2023
Modified by: Steven R Brandt

Please report errors in award information by writing to: awardsearch@nsf.gov.

Print this page

Back to Top of page