Listening to the sounds of gravity

A new effort put forth at Syracuse University seeks to build a supercomputer …

One of the more interesting predictions of Einstein's general relativity is the existence of gravity waves. Relativity predicts that not only will massive objects warp the very fabric of spacetime, but that sudden variations will result in waves in spacetime—gravity waves—that will propagate outward at the speed of light. According to the Gravitational Wave Group at Syracuse University: "By measuring gravitational waves, we hope to learn about systems that cannot be observed with existing means, such as optical, radio, infrared, etc."

"Hey, as long as you don't
make
me smell Uranus."

Sounds great, until one tries to figure out how exactly to measure perturbations in the fabric of the universe itself. Scientists from around the world hope to detect this phenomenon by attempting to measure minute differences in the time it takes light to travel down two perpendicular arms of a large scale interferometer (LIGO). Even with one such instrument, one must analyze the immense amounts of data produced. According to Duncan Brown, assistant professor of physics at Syracuse, "Looking for gravitational waves is like listening to the universe. Different kinds of events produce different wave patterns. We want to try to extract a wave pattern—a special sound—that matches our model from all of the noise in the LIGO data." To do this, Syracuse is building a dedicated supercomputer to listen to the sounds of the Universe.

The supercomputer will be dubbed SUGAR—SU Gravitational and Relativity Cluster—and will exist to process data from the LIGO observatories. SUGAR will consist of 80 systems containing 320 CPUs, 640GB of RAM, and a whopping 96TB of disk space to store the raw data. The team hopes to have the system up and running by the end of the month. However, before they can start listening for black holes, they need to figure out what a black hole sounds like. Working in collaboration with the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes project, the researchers plan to simulate the sounds of two black holes colliding. With an idea of what to look or listen for, researchers can begin to examine the universe in a whole new light—or octave.

Matt Ford / Matt is a contributing writer at Ars Technica, focusing on physics, astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, and engineering. When he's not writing, he works on realtime models of large-scale engineering systems.