Supporting the Computing Needs of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration

by Dr Dan Wysocki (Center for Gravitation, Cosmology & Astrophysics University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee)

Friday Mar 20, 2026, 12:00 PM → 1:00 PM Europe/Madrid

C7b/058 - Seminar (IFAE Main Building C7b)

The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration is best known for its operation of the gravitational wave observatories responsible for detecting coalescing black holes and neutron stars.  What's less often discussed is the large and complex computing infrastructure used to support the distribution and analysis of gravitational wave data.  In this talk, I will take you behind the scenes, showing how the data are distributed globally; how distributed data analysis is performed with HTCondor; how astronomers are informed of detections through the Rapid Alert Pipeline; and how we support the communication needs of three collaborations containing thousands of scientists spanning five continents.