An Overview Of Computational Astrophysics

 
    • Astronomical detector capacity is growing exponentially.
    • The data-deluge covers the entire photon spectrum, and new signals like neutrinos & gravity waves.
    • Two computational challenges

      - the capacity of the data analyses used to compress and characterize the data.

      - the fidelity of the simulations used to generate theoretical predictions.

    • With the size and complexity of the Universe there will never be too much computing power - bring on the Googleflop!
    • As a benchmark, 100 Tflop for 2 weeks runtime is one hundred billion billion (1020) flops.
    • What follows is a small sample of simulations and data analyses spanning the history of spacetime, noting

      (a) the scientific context

      (b) the current computational state-of-the-art and bottlenecks

      (c) what 100 Tflops would enable

      with many caveats !