PIC Colloquium - Needles and Haystacks at Scale: The Evolution of LIGO-Virgo Computing

by Peter Couvares (Caltech)

Tuesday 9 Jul 2019, 12:00 → 13:30 Europe/Madrid

Edifici D - Campus UAB - Hemeroteca (1st Floor)

Abstract:

There are many technical and organizational challenges of gravitational-wave data analysis at scale, and the computing demands of LIGO and Virgo have evolved in the era of multi-messenger astrophysics following the tremendous discoveries over the past four years.  This talk will describe the LIGO computing infrastructure, its strengths and limitations, and efforts by the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration to address them.  It will focus on LIGO's broadly-defined data analysis computing optimization campaign, which extends from code optimization into process and resource optimizations to increase the scientific payoff of the public's investment in people and machinery.

Bio:

Peter Couvares is a Senior Research Scientist at Caltech. He is responsible for managing data analysis computing for the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) Laboratory, and leads the LIGO Scientific Collaboration's efforts to optimize the performance and scaling of gravitational-wave search codes. He has worked in industry and academia on distributed computing problems for three decades, helping to write core parts of the HTCondor software, and collaborating with scientists across a variety of disciplines.