Distributed High Performance Computing

Science Utilization with Cloud-Based HPC

There are several activities in the science utilization of the raw data from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) that require extensive computations and will benefit substantially from exploiting the distributed resources available to the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration:

  • correlating the raw interferometric data
  • performing large-scale General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamic simulations of accretion flows onto black holes
  • generating synthetic data based on numerical simulations
  • interpreting the EHT observations and comparing models to observations using computational statistics tools.

An additional challenge faced by a global collaboration, such as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), is the vast amount of data and simulations that will need to be mirrored in all high-performance computing centers that participate in the science activities. An alternative approach is to store all data and simulations on the same server (the “cloud”) and only distribute the computational resources.

Black Hole PIRE team members collectively develop the cloud-computing infrastructure that will allow the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration to:

  • distribute the computational load of the different aspects of science utilization to clusters around the globe
  • enable geographically dispersed groups to upload their simulations on servers and process the simulations through the algorithms for a direct comparison of the data
  • use statistical tools to directly compare to the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) observations

We base our approach on the highly successful, NSF-funded CyVerse project at the University of Arizona, which has transformed cloud-computing and data sharing in the life sciences.

Our Black Hole PIRE-developed tools will facilitate the dissemination and efficient utilization of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) data products within the Event EHT collaboration and, as the data products become publicly available, to the broader astronomical community.