ABSTRACT

The cyberinfrastructure needs for gravitational wave astrophysics, high energy physics, and large-scale electromagnetic surveys have rapidly evolved in recent years. The construction and upgrade of the facilities used to enable scientific discovery in these disparate fields of research have led to a common pair of computational grand challenges: (i) datasets with ever-increasing complexity and volume; and (ii) data mining analyses that must be performed in real-time with oversubscribed computational resources. Furthermore, the convergence of gravitational wave astrophysics with electromagnetic and astroparticle surveys, the very birth of Multi-Messenger Astrophysics, has already provided a glimpse of the transformational discoveries that it will enable in years to come. Given the unique potential for scientific discovery with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the combination of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) for Multi-Messenger Astrophysics, the community needs to accelerate the development and exploitation of deep learning algorithms that will outperform existing approaches. This project serves the national interest, as stated by NSF's mission, by promoting the progress of science. It will push the frontiers of deep learning at scale, demonstrating the versatility and scalability of these methods to accelerate and enable new physics in the big data era. Because these methods are also applicable to many other parts of our national and global economy and society, this work will positively impact many fields. The students and junior scientists to be mentored and trained in this research will interact closely with our industry partners, creating new career opportunities, and strengthening synergies between academia and industry. The team will share the algorithms with the community through open source software repositories, and through our tutorials and workshops the team will train the community regarding software credit and software citation.

In this project, the PIs will build upon our recent work developing high quality deep learning algorithms for real-time data analytics of time-series and image datasets, as open source software. This work combines scalable deep learning algorithms, trained with TB-size datasets within minutes using thousands of GPUs/CPUs, with state-of-the-art approaches to endow the predictions of deterministic deep learning models with complete posterior distributions. The team will also investigate the use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to accelerate low-latency inference of machine learning algorithms to minimize the demands of future computing, which is a central goal for Multi-Messenger Astrophysics and particle physics. The open source tools to be developed as part of these activities will be readily shared with and adopted by LIGO, LHC, and LSST as core data analytics algorithms that will significantly increase the speed and depth of existing algorithms, enabling new physics while requiring minimal computational resources for real-time inferences analyses. The team will organize deep learning workshops and bootcamps to train students and researchers on how to use and contribute to our framework, creating a wide network of contributors and developers across key science missions. The team will leverage existing open source and interactive model repositories, such as the Data and Learning Hub for Science (DLHub) at Argonne, to reach out to a large cross-section of communities that analyze open datasets from LIGO, LHC, and LSST, and that will benefit from the use of these technologies that require minimal computational resources for inference tasks.

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

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

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