UW System researchers played role in Nobel-winning gravitational wave discovery


The three researchers led an extensive international team, known as the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, that discovered ripples in space-time called gravitational waves. The existence of such waves was predicted by Einstein a century ago.


UW–Madison’s HTCondor High-Throughput Computing software served as the computing infrastructure for managing the analysis of the data collected by the two detectors of the LIGO observatory. In high-throughput computing, massive tasks are made possible by breaking them down into smaller jobs that can be run on thousands of networked computers. Condor ran complex data analysis workflows on computing resources throughout the U.S. and Europe, encompassing computational tasks from about 700 researchers.

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