Citation: ``The DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative is aiming at leading, ground breaking applications in selected areas of science and technology dealing with complex, demanding, innovative simulations with a label of excellence from at least one national evaluation committee''.
The team, lead by Vitor Cardoso from CENTRA/IST, is a joint collaboration with Leonardo Gualtieri (Rome), Carlos Herdeiro (OPorto) and Ulrich Sperhake (Barcelona). These researchers are trying to understand what happens when black holes collide, a fundamental process in General Relativity with applications to astrophysics and collider physics.Collisions of black holes generate a huge amount of gravitational radiation, which can be detectable with current gravitational-wave telescopes. But besides this, they can answer long-standing questionsin the field, which physicists such as Stephen Hawking have been trying to understand for decades. For instance, if the black holes collide at sufficiently large velocities, can one ``strip'' the event horizon off, and end up with a naked singularity?
The computational time just awarded will allow the team to investigate these and other issues. For further details on the team's work, see the black holes webpage.
The proposals submitted this year to the DEISA initiative involve researchers from 30 countries - 22 in Europe and eight from the continents of America, Asia, and Australasia. More than half a billion computer-hours have been requested, an over-subscription by a factor of ten. For further information on the DECI information, see this webpage.