The Cactus Code The Grid and Globus Cactus and Distributed Computing Numerical Relativity Scientists have theorized about gravitational waves since Einstein's prediction of their existence over fifty years ago.
Several projects involving their detection are now underway.
Because the simulations involve solving thousands of complex, coupled nonlinear hyperbolic-elliptic partial differential equations, it has only been in the last few years that the most powerful parallel computers have been able to solve these equations in 3D. For more discussion on numerical relativity, please see the Ripples in Spacetime web page . In fact, cactus also has an isosurfacing thorn that computes isosurfaces of desired quantities in parallel with the simulation. The polygon data can be displayed on an Immersadesk or desktop while the simulation is running. Scaling results indicate that cactus performs very well over a range of processors and can efficiently utilize more CPU's. Applications taking advantage of the Grid can bring geographically separated researchers closer together by presenting an efficient method for the collaboration and sharing of results as well as harnessing multiple resources.