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CHPC hosts Cluster Comparison Cape Town (CompaCT) 2016 Workshop

11 June 2016 by in 2016News

 During 11-15 July 2016, 20 astronomers from around the world gathered under one roof at the CHPC in Cape Town to continue their efforts in trying to understand the scatter between different state-of-the-art hydrodynamical codes when simulating the growth and evolution of galaxy clusters. The CompaCT workshop, organised by Daniel Cunnama (UWC postdoctoral fellow) and Sean February (CHPC research scientist), attracted a number of local students and postdocs in the field.  The workshop – the 3rd of its kind in a series of internationally hosted galaxy cluster comparison workshops that began in Madrid in 2014 – was a great success. Productivity levels were on par with previous workshops. Each participant was provided with access to one of CHPC’s Ranger nodes (i.e. 16 cores, 64 GB RAM), which was managed by ACE lab’s Israel Tshililo. 

Chris Power kicking things off with a summary of where we are. [Image credit: Prospery Simpemba]
Chris Power kicking things off with a summary of where we are. [Image credit: Prospery Simpemba]

In keeping with previous workshops, the program for the week was dominated by sessions of working on projects of interest, engaging with collaborators, and presenting some interesting findings to everyone as they came up. 

Left: participants hard at work. Right: NASSP Masters student Londiwe Ndlangamandla updating us on her bold project involving the classification of 300 simulated galaxy clusters. [Image credit: Prospery Simpemba]
Left: participants hard at work. Right: NASSP Masters student Londiwe Ndlangamandla updating us on her bold project involving the classification of 300 simulated galaxy clusters. [Image credit: Prospery Simpemba]

After a variety of comparisons for one particular galaxy cluster, this project already resulted in 5 publications with a few more expected to come out of the current workshop. 

Charles Crosby (left) providing an overview of the CHPC, and Sean February (right) showing off the CHPC's shiny new Lengau supercomputer. [Image credit: Prospery Simpemba]
Charles Crosby (left) providing an overview of the CHPC, and Sean February (right) showing off the CHPC’s shiny new Lengau supercomputer. [Image credit: Prospery Simpemba]

Comparison data is currently being made available for a additional 5 simulated galaxy clusters and various projects have been initiated during the week, including:- Tracking individual halos through cosmic time to investigate pre-processing, gas stripping and backsplash.- The formation and evolution of protoclusters.- Ionization fractions at high redshift.- Investigation into sources of hydrostatic mass bias. The support of this workshop both technically and financially, demonstrated not only CHPC’s, but more generally the Department of Science and Technology’s, commitment to train and prepare young and local researchers for big data problems in Science and beyond.

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