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| Ken Olum, Jose Blanco-Pillado and Ben Shlaer |
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| Ken Olum, Jose Blanco-Pillado and |
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I are using the cluster to attempt to solve an important question in cosmology, namely "How big are cosmic string loops?" Cosmic strings are ultra-thin fast moving filaments hypothesized to be winding throughout the universe, most of it in the form of long loops. There has been much theoretical interest and work in cosmic strings, but before we can connect the theory to future observations, we need to know the typical sizes of the loops the network produces.It turns out this is an ideal question to solve numerically, since the evolution of each individual string segment is easy to compute, and the tremendous scales over which the network evolves makes analytic work extremely difficult.
What makes this exciting now is that the previous generation of numerical cosmic string simulations disagreed on what the right answer is. We believe that current hardware is sufficient to enable us to answer the question definitively.
Alireza Aghasi
The research that I am doing is very computational and requires a lot of processing and memory. I basically deal with Electrical Resistance Tomography (ERT), for detection of contaminants under the surface of the earth. The problem ends up being a very high dimensional Inverse problem which is intensively ill-posed. Dealing with such a problem without appropriate processing power is impossible. Once I became aware of the cluster I started exploring it and realized that some features of it really help me in the processing speed. The excellent feature which really interested me was the good performance in sparse matrix calculations. Star-P does an excellent job dealing with very large sparse systems compared with other platforms. Personally I experienced some very good results using Star-P.
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