Spotlight: December 2009
Black holes. You hear about them, read about them, but never see them. There is a good reason for that. While supermassive in size, with hundreds or even billion times the mass of the Sun, black holes are invisible; so compact that even the speed of light can’t escape them. They can only be found indirectly, via their effects on the matter that surrounds them.
- Two graduate student members of the LSU Black Hole simulation team are, left to right, Oleg Korobkin, physics, and Cornelius Toole Jr., computer science.
A team of 13 researchers and students from Louisiana State University Center for Computation & Technology (CCT), many of whom participate in Louisiana EPSCoR’s NSF-funded CyberTools project, has produced a black hole simulation project involving equations written by Albert Einstein that are so complex they can’t be written down on paper. It was the top winner in an international competition, the SCALE 2009 challenge at CCGrid09, a conference for scalable computing, in which scientists use computer systems that can easily adapt, or scale up, to provide greater performance and computing power and give them greater capability to solve complex problems.
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