Supercomputer for IUB

Last week a supercomputer was installed on campus. Dr. Stephan Rosswog, Professor of Astrophysics, will use the computer for his research on neutron stars and black holes. Furthermore a substantial part of the machine's computing capacity will be accessible to users of IUB's Computational Laboratory for Analysis, Modeling and Visualization (CLAMV).

[ Apr 18, 2005]  Astrophysicist Rosswog will employ the shared-memory supercomputer to simulate collisions between superdense neutron stars and black holes. These collisions are believed to cause gamma-ray bursts, the most violent explosions since the beginning of the Universe by “the Big Bang”. Several gamma-ray bursts are detected each day at random positions in the sky. They relase much more energy within a second than our sun would have radiated away in the entire lifetime of the Universe.

Supercomputers lead the world in terms of processing capacity, particularly their speed of calculation. IUB’s supercomputer was produced by SGI, a leader in high-performance computing. A machine of the same architecture, but with more processors is currently number two on the list of the fastest supercomputers in the world: www.top500.org/.

Neutron stars... ...have a mass of the same order as the mass of the Sun. Their radius is typically 10 km, about 70,000 times smaller than the radius of the Sun. So a neutron star's mass is packed into a much smaller volume, therefore the average mass density is 10 to the power of 14 times higher than the density of our Sun. These densities are comparable to the densities inside atomic nuclei, in this sense neutron stars may be considered “giant atomic nuclei”.

CLAMV... ...is the center for scientific computing at IUB. This includes participation in scientific research projects as well as graduate teaching. CLAMV provides and maintains the hardware and software facilities needed and gives support for running projects. Scientific projects come from rather different areas. more info »