 The Theoretical Astrophysics Group at Northwestern studies a broad range of cutting-edge research problems in the physics of compact
objects, from massive black holes to neutron stars, pulsars and white
dwarfs. Many of these problems involve interactions in binary
systems, which can lead to hydrodynamic phenomena such as accretion
flows and binary mergers, high energy phenomena (X-ray, gamma-ray
emission), and strong sources of gravitational radiation.
Our group
also uses supercomputers to simulate the dynamical evolution of dense
star clusters, including those around supermassive black holes in
galactic nuclei, and the formation and evolution of planetary
systems. Our in-house computational facilities include a large number
of Macintosh and Linux workstations as well as a parallel computer
cluster, Typhoon, comprising 80 processors, 70GB of RAM, and 5TB of
disk space. Our new Beowulf computer cluster, Fugu, is comprised of of 78 general-purpose nodes and two dedicated nodes designed specifically for n-body calculations, as well as a large compute node optimized for parallel tasks. Each node contains either two quad core 2.2 GHz (30) or two dual core 2.8 GHz (48) AMD Opteron processors with 2 GB of RAM per core. The large compute node features 4 quad core 2.2 GHz AMD Opteron processors and 32 GB of RAM as well as four 146GB SAS 15k RPM hard drives. There are 13 TB of hard disk space available in a RAID-6 array which is attached to the master node via mini SAS channel. The master node is connected to the central network switch via a 10 Gb/s Ethernet adapter, while the rest of the nodes are connected using a 1 Gb/s network. The cluster runs the ROCKS clustering operating system, and
uses Sun Grid Engine with Condor checkpointing support for job scheduling.
Associated faculty in the Physics and Astronomy
Department also work on problems at the interface between
astrophysics and particle physics, such as cosmology and neutrino
astrophysics, and between nonlinear dynamics and general relativity.
We often collaborate with astronomers at other universities around
the world, as in our many projects based on data from the Chandra X-
ray Observatory and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave
Observatory.
|
