High Performance Simulation for Resonant-Mass Gravitational Radiation Antennas

In this paper the design and validation of a high performance simulation is discussed that is of critical value to the feasibility study of the GRAIL project, the aim of which is to build a gravitational radiation antenna. Two relatively simple simulation models of this antenna are shown to be too restrictive for our purposes, necessitating the development of a simulation program that utilizes an explicit finite element kernel. The computational complexity of this simulation kernel requires the power that is offered by high performance computing methodology. Therefore it is tailored for execution on parallel systems. Since it is developed from scratch, we can circumvent notorious parallel programming pitfalls that usually are present in code migration. The simulation program is validated for its physical correctness as well as its performance gain. Performance results are presented for two distributed memory parallel systems: A Parsytec PowerXplorer (32 PowerPC's) and Parsytec CC (40 PowerPC+'s).