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GravitySimulator
gravitySimulator is a novel supercomputer that incorporates special-purpose GRAPE hardware to solve the gravitational ''n''-body problem. It is housed in the Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation (CCRG) at the Rochester Institute of Technology. It became operational in 2005. The computer consists of 32 nodes, each of which contains a GRAPE-6A board ("mini-GRAPE") in a Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) slot. The GRAPE boards use pipelines to compute pairwise forces between particles at a speed of 130 Gflops. The on-board memory of each GRAPE board can hold data for 128,000 particles, and by combining 32 of them in a cluster, a total of four million particles can be integrated, at sustained speeds of 4 Tflops. gravitySimulator is used to study the dynamical evolution of galaxies and galactic nuclei An active galactic nucleus (AGN) is a compact region at the center of a galaxy that emits a significant amount of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Center For Computational Relativity And Gravitation
The Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation (CCRG) is a research center of the College of Science (COS) and a Research Center of Excellence at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) dedicated to research at the frontiers of numerical relativity and relativistic astrophysics, gravitational-wave physics, its connection to experiments and observations, and high-performance computation and scientific visualization. Faculty members currently include Hans-Peter Bischof, Joshua Faber, Manuela Campanelli (scientist), Manuela Campanelli (Director), Carlos Lousto, David Merritt, John Whelan, Yosef Zlochower and Richard O'Shaughnessy. Computing facilities in the CCRG include gravitySimulator, a 32-node computer that uses special-purpose Gravity Pipe, GRAPE hardware to achieve speeds of 4teraflop, Tflops in gravitational N-body problem, ''N''-body calculations; [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gravity Pipe
Gravity Pipe (abbreviated GRAPE) is a project which uses hardware acceleration to perform gravitational computations. Integrated with Beowulf-style commodity computers, the GRAPE system calculates the force of gravity that a given mass, such as a star, exerts on others. The project resides at University of Tokyo. The GRAPE hardware acceleration component "pipes" the force computation to the general-purpose computer serving as a node in a parallelized cluster as the innermost loop of the gravitational model. The GRAPE project designed an ASIC component with mathematical logic and operations to generate the required computations. This means the latter generations of GRAPE supercomputers, despite not providing a Turing complete computational processing power, are powerful for heavily mathematical super-computing usages. The MD-GRAPE 3 supercomputer was also used in protein folding simulations. Its shortened name, GRAPE, was chosen as an intentional reference to the Apple I ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2022, supercomputers have existed which can perform over 1018 FLOPS, so called Exascale computing, exascale supercomputers. For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (1011) to tens of teraFLOPS (1013). Since November 2017, all of the TOP500, world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers. Supercomputers play an important role in the field of computational science, and are used for a wide range of computationally intensive tasks in various fields, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
N-body Problem
In physics, the -body problem is the problem of predicting the individual motions of a group of astronomical object, celestial objects interacting with each other gravitationally.Leimanis and Minorsky: Our interest is with Leimanis, who first discusses some history about the -body problem, especially Ms. Kovalevskaya's 1868–1888 twenty-year complex-variables approach, failure; Section 1: "The Dynamics of Rigid Bodies and Mathematical Exterior Ballistics" (Chapter 1, "The motion of a rigid body about a fixed point (Euler and Poisson equations)"; Chapter 2, "Mathematical Exterior Ballistics"), good precursor background to the -body problem; Section 2: "Celestial Mechanics" (Chapter 1, "The Uniformization of the Three-body Problem (Restricted Three-body Problem)"; Chapter 2, "Capture in the Three-Body Problem"; Chapter 3, "Generalized -body Problem"). Solving this problem has been motivated by the desire to understand the motions of the Sun, Moon, planets, and visible stars. In th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rochester Institute Of Technology
The Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is a private university, private research university in Henrietta, New York, a suburb of Rochester, New York, Rochester. It was founded in 1829. It is one of only two institute of technology, institutes of technology in New York state, the other being the New York Institute of Technology. RIT enrolls about 19,000 students, of whom 16,000 are undergraduate and 3,000 are graduate students. These students come from all 50 states in the United States and more than 100 countries. The university has more than 4,000 faculty and staff. It also has branches abroad in Croatia, Kosovo, and the United Arab Emirates. The university is Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity". History The university began as a result of an 1891 merger between Rochester Athenæum, a struggling literary society founded in 1829 by Nathaniel Rochester, Colonel Nathaniel Rocheste ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peripheral Component Interconnect
Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) is a local computer bus for attaching hardware devices in a computer and is part of the PCI Local Bus standard. The PCI bus supports the functions found on a processor bus but in a standardized format that is independent of any given processor's native bus. Devices connected to the PCI bus appear to a bus master to be connected directly to its own bus and are assigned addresses in the processor's address space. It is a parallel bus, synchronous to a single bus clock. Attached devices can take either the form of an integrated circuit fitted onto the motherboard (called a ''planar device'' in the PCI specification) or an expansion card that fits into a slot. The PCI Local Bus was first implemented in IBM PC compatibles, where it displaced the combination of several slow Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) slots and one fast VESA Local Bus (VLB) slot as the bus configuration. It has subsequently been adopted for other computer types ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gigaflop
Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measure than measuring instructions per second. Floating-point arithmetic Floating-point arithmetic is needed for very large or very small real numbers, or computations that require a large dynamic range. Floating-point representation is similar to scientific notation, except computers use base two (with rare exceptions), rather than base ten. The encoding scheme stores the sign, the exponent (in base two for Cray and VAX, base two or ten for IEEE floating point formats, and base 16 for IBM Floating Point Architecture) and the significand (number after the radix point). While several similar formats are in use, the most common is ANSI/IEEE Std. 754-1985. This standard defines the format for 32-bit numbers called ''single precision'', as wel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Galaxies
A galaxy is a system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, and dark matter bound together by gravity. The word is derived from the Greek ' (), literally 'milky', a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar System. Galaxies, averaging an estimated 100 million stars, range in size from dwarfs with less than a thousand stars, to the largest galaxies known – supergiants with one hundred trillion stars, each orbiting its galaxy's centre of mass. Most of the mass in a typical galaxy is in the form of dark matter, with only a few per cent of that mass visible in the form of stars and nebulae. Supermassive black holes are a common feature at the centres of galaxies. Galaxies are categorised according to their visual morphology as elliptical, spiral, or irregular. The Milky Way is an example of a spiral galaxy. It is estimated that there are between 200 billion () to 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. Most galaxies are 1,000 to 10 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Galactic Nuclei
An active galactic nucleus (AGN) is a compact region at the center of a galaxy that emits a significant amount of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum, with characteristics indicating that this luminosity is not produced by the stars. Such excess, non-stellar emissions have been observed in the radio, microwave, infrared, optical, ultra-violet, X-ray and gamma ray wavebands. A galaxy hosting an AGN is called an active galaxy. The non-stellar radiation from an AGN is theorized to result from the accretion of matter by a supermassive black hole at the center of its host galaxy. Active galactic nuclei are the most luminous persistent sources of electromagnetic radiation in the universe and, as such, can be used as a means of discovering distant objects; their evolution as a function of cosmic time also puts constraints on models of the cosmos. The observed characteristics of an AGN depend on several properties such as the mass of the central black hole, the rate of gas accretio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Merritt
David Roy Merritt (born November 16, 1955, in Los Angeles) is an American astrophysicist. He is known for Osipkov–Merritt model, the Leonard–Merritt mass estimator and the M–sigma relation. Education and career He received in 1982 his PhD in Astrophysical Sciences from Princeton University with thesis advisor Jeremiah P. Ostriker and held postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Berkeley and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto. Merritt's fields of specialization include dynamics and evolution of galaxies, supermassive black holes, and computational astrophysics. Until 2017, he was a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in Rochester, New York. He was a former Chair of the Division on Dynamical Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society. He is a founding member of the Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation at RIT. His scientific contributions include Osipkov–Merritt models, bl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
