Title: Listen to the Universe — On the First Direct Observation of Gravitational Waves

Speaker：Fan Zhang

Time：15:30, November 26

Venue: C505 Haiyun Admin Building

Abstract: On February 11, 2016, The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the LIGO team announced the successful detection of gravitational waves.  We have dramatically confirmed Einstein’s theory of general relativity and opened up a new window in which to view the universe. LIGO is a joint effort Led by Caltech and MIT, sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). LIGO is the largest single enterprise undertaken by NSF, with capital investments of nearly $300 million and operating costs of more than $20 million per year. In particular, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) consists of more than 1,000 scientists from over 30 institutions worldwide.

As a computer scientist, I have been an active member and contributor of the LSC for seven years since 2009, among which four years as a full-time contributor and three years as an affiliate contributor. I have been playing critical roles in research and development of cloud computing software for the LIGO project. I have been in charge of research and development of the LSC Computing Platform, an infrastructure that links supercomputers (with thousands of CPUs) and high performance storage (with terabytes of data storage capabilities) distributed at over ten LSC Computing sites in the U.S. and Europe. The LSC Computing Platform enables hundreds of researchers to seamless access to geographically distributed LSC grid resources for large-scale data analysis and monitoring.

In this talk, I will unveil the mystery of the gravitational wave science and present the mechanism of the gravitational-wave detection.

Biographical Sketch:

Dr. Fan Zhang is currently a research scientist and senior software engineer with the IBM Massachusetts Laboratory. He is also co-appointed as a research affiliate with the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received a Ph.D. in Department of Control Science and Engineering, Tsinghua University in January 2012. From 2011 to 2013, he was a research scientist at Cloud Computing Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon University. After that, he joined MIT Kavli Institute as a postdoctoral associate.

He received a breakthrough award for being one of the major contributors that have discovered the gravitational waves in 2016. An IEEE Senior Member, he received an honorarium research award from the University of Chicago and Argonne National Lab (2013), a Faculty Education Award from Amazon Web Service (2013), an Meritorious Service Award (2013) from IEEE Transactions on Service Computing, two IBM Ph.D. Fellowship awards (2010 and 2011). His research domains include big-data scientific computing applications, simulation-based optimization approaches, gravitational wave data analysis, cloud computing, and novel programming models for streaming data applications on elastic cloud platforms. According to Google Scholar, his published work has been cited more than 3670 times as of November 2016.