Talk by Brajesh Gupt

Time: 11:00 am (Wednesday April 18th)
Tiltle: Kasner transition in Bianchi-I loop quantum cosmology
Where: 241 Nicholson

Ted Jacobson visits

Prof. Ted Jacobson (Univ. Maryland) will visit our department and give a talk at 3pm on Monday April 9th in 241 Nicholson about issues of black hole thermodynamics.

Visit and talk (Jan 23) by Edison Montoya

Edison Montoya of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Morelia will visit our group Jan 23-28.

He will also give a talk:

Speaker: Edison Montoya, UNAM-Morelia
Title: Efective dynamics in Bianchi type II loop quantum cosmology
Date: Jan 23rd (Monday) 11am room 241 Nicholson.

Talk by Evan Ranken

Title: Exponential potentials and assisted inflation in LQC
Speaker: Evan Ranken, Colorado College
Date: Friday January 13th
Place: 241 Nicholson

Evan did an REU in our group last year.

Tim Koslowski visits

Tim Koslowski from Perimeter Institute visits Jan 4-7. He will give a talk on the 5th at 10am in 241 Nicholson about Shape Dynamics

Talk by Prof. Du

Title: Accelerating Gravitational Wave Data Processing on GPU
Time: 1:30pm Dec 5th 2011
Place: 338 Johnston Hall
Speaker: Prof. Zhihui Du, Tsinghua University

We present a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) accelerated time-domain
low-latency algorithm to search for gravitational waves (GWs) from
coalescing binaries of compact objects based on the Summed Parallel Infinite
Impulse Response (SPIIR) filtering technique. The aim is to facilitate fast
detection of GWs with minimum delay to allow prompt electromagnetic
follow-up observations.  To maximize the GPU acceleration,  we apply an
efficient batched parallel computing model that significantly reduces the
number of synchronizations in SPIIR and optimizes the usage of the memory
and hardware resource.  Our code is tested on the latest CUDA Fermi
architecture in a GTX 480 graphics card and its performance is compared with
a single core of Intel Core i7 920 (2.67 GHz). A 47-fold speedup is achieved
while giving results in close agreement with the CPU implementation. Our
result indicates that it is possible to conduct a full search for
gravitational waves from compact binary coalescence in real time with only
one desktop computer equipped with a Fermi GPU card for the current
generation of GW detectors which would otherwise require more than 100 CPUs.

Rodolfo Gambini visits Nov 15-23