Astronomy Morning

Honoring the year of astronomy, Tuesday's morning was dedicated to astronomy talks. Prof. Ibanez lead through the morning .

Miguel Angel Aloy tried to make plausible Why is it worth to spend 1.5 million CPU-hours in relativistic astrophysics.


Data processing of the GAIA mission is a challenging task. Xavier Luri of the University of Barcelona gave an interesting insight in how this challenge is going to be met.


Simulations of the inspiral and merger of unequal-mass neutron star binaries was the topic of José A. Font talk, who is from the Universidad de Valencia.


Finding interesting phenomena in cosmological simulation which can be used to understand observations is an important methodology in astrophysics.
Steffen Knollmann from the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid highlighted the various aspects of such analysis task on the basis of cosmological n-body simulations.


Relativistic hydrodynamic flows were simulated by Manuel Perucho from the Universidad de Valencia. He presented method and results on simulations of the interactions of hydrodynamic jets and stellar wind as well as the evolution of such jets.


The morning ended with a lively discussion on what users what like to see improved by hard- and software vendors including the tools providers from the various computing centers present.
Most of the concern dealt with the event of multicore processors exhibiting a large number of compute cores. Here, it was agreed that OpenMP/MPI hybrid codes seem to be the future interm of addressing the multicore challenge.
Nevertheless, various people pointed out that OpenMP/MPI hybridization is as a challenge in itself. Employing this kind of hybridization means for most applications a complete redesign of the (MPI-centric) application.

Furthermore, it was noted that the current I/O libraries suffer from various problems. The most prominent one is certainly the lack of support for high cpu numbers (>10000). Here, most libraries have limits which renders them unusable in a supercomputing context. But also better possibilities for handling large amounts of data in file systems was formulated as a demand to parallel filesystem vendors.