The Center for Gravitation and Cosmology is a research group within the
Physics Department at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee (UWM).
Within this center is a group of researchers working on the
LIGO Experiment, a large national
project to detect and study gravitational waves, as part of the
LIGO Scientific Collaboration
(LSC). The work of the UWM LSC group
is centered on the analysis of LIGO data.
This analysis is extremely computation-intensive, and benchmarking studies carried
out the by the UWM LSC group and researchers at Caltech have indicated
that Beowulf-type machines are the most cost-effective way to carry out
LIGO's data analysis. Many of the algorithms being developed for this analysis
are being tested on data from a prototype experiment (the 40-meter detector)
and the UWM LSC group has set up a Beowulf machine to use for this purpose.
