Please join us for the next IACS Seminar this Friday, April 27, 2012.
Speaker: Lincoln Greenhill, Senior Research Fellow, Harvard University Faculty of Arts and
Sciences; Lecturer in the Department of Astronomy; and Radio Astronomer at the Smithsonian
Astrophysical Observatory
Location: Maxwell-Dworkin G125, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Time: Informal lunch with speaker, 12:30pm. Talk, 1:00pm.
Title: Frontier Cosmology and GPU Computing
Abstract:
New-generation radio telescopes consisting of hundreds and thousands of VHF dipole
antennas are being built to study the distribution of Hydrogen in the intergalactic medium
of the early Universe. The signal processing challenge is daunting. Where high arithmetic
intensity is achieved (e.g., cross-correlation), GPU computing is a promising solution.
This will be featured in the newly funded LEDA array, as it seeks to detect signatures of
the first galaxies and supermassive black holes. Power consumption, head load, and
footprint are critical challenges in achieving the 100 TFlop/s required by LEDA and are
key considerations for future instruments, demanding 10 PFlop/s in 5 years and 1 EFlop/s
in 10 years.
Bio:
Lincoln J. Greenhill earned his S.B. in physics from MIT and Ph.D. in astronomy from
Harvard in 1990. He has been a Fellow and a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley's
Miller Institute for Basic Research but is day-to-day a Senior Research Fellow in the
Astronomy Department and Radio Astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
His primary research focus is observational cosmology targeting the universe when at just
a percent of its present age and populated by the first generations of stars and black
holes. His development of radio astronomical instrumentation goes hand-in-hand with
explorations in computational science.
For information about future events at IACS, see
http://iacs.seas.harvard.edu/events
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