This morning, one of our HPC cluster clients won the Nobel Prize for Physics! The project was supported and continues to be supported by Nor-Tech Technology. Rainer Weiss, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, both of the California Institute of Technology, were awarded the prize for the discovery of ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves–predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago but never directly seen until late 2015. The official announcement by the National Science Foundation (NSF) was Feb. 11, 2016. In announcing today’s award, the Royal Swedish Academy called it “a discovery that shook the world.”
We have been working with several LIGO consortium members, including Cal-Tech, Cal State Fullerton, Syracuse University and University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, for more than 11 years on the project by designing, building, and upgrading a number of the clusters that made the original detection and subsequent detections possible. Nor-Tech has a close working relationship with many of the scientists involved.
Since the discovery, we have added major capacity to one LIGO university’s main cluster; are working with another LIGO university to replace its 5-year old GPU cluster; and we are continually adding compute capacity to other LIGO clusters.
Nor-Tech is currently working with Cal-Tech’s LIGO team to determine future HPC cluster needs. Specifically Cal-Tech and the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee are testing applications and platforms on Nor-Tech’s groundbreaking demo cluster.