About RIT’s Black Hole Lab

The Black Hole Lab at RIT’s Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation consists of the advanced computer clusters NewHorizons and BlueSky.

The facility is integral to the center’s research and represents a commitment to green computing. Opticool Technologies, an in-rack green cooling solution installed in 2012, has a 60-ton cooling capacity. It is more efficient than traditional HVAC solutions and safer than water-based solutions that could develop faulty cooling lines, said Manuela Campanelli, director of the center and professor in RIT’s School of Mathematical Sciences.

Carlos Lousto, a member of the center and a professor in the School of Mathematical Sciences, designed the NewHorizons and BlueSky supercomputer clusters at RIT to perform binary black hole simulations.

BlueSky Linux is a 1040 processor cluster with more than 4 terabytes of onboard DDR3 RAM and 200 terabytes of high-speed Lustre-based storage interconnected with a QDR InfiniBand network. NewHorizons is a 736 processor Linux cluster with 3 TB of onboard RAM and over 100 TB of storage.

Scientists at the center supplement the Black Hole Lab with powerful supercomputing resources available for open scientific research at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications. Some of their largest simulations are done at the peta-scale Blue Waters system at the Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputer Applications and XSEDE resources.

“Resources at the Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation, combined with our key experts in the field, are why we are one of the main contributors to the rapid growth of gravitational physics,” Campanelli said.