Chris Richardson and Tony Crider receive grant for galaxy studies

Astronomy professors awarded $14,500 of computing resources from NSF-funded program to peform galaxy simulations and analysis.

Chris Richardson, assistant professor of physics, and Tony Crider, associate professor of physics, have received a $14,500 grant from the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) program. XSEDE is a five-year, $121-million program funded by the National Science Foundation and is touted as the “most advanced, powerful, and robust collection of integrated advanced digital resources and services in the world.”

The allocation of high-end computational resources, visualization and storage using XSEDE is done via a peer-reviewed, competitive process, designed in a similar fashion to the NSF peer review system. Their proposal, “Theoretical Modeling of Emission Line Regions in Star-Forming Galaxies,” received full funding—more than a quarter million CPU hours.

Professor Richardson will be working with junior physics major Helen Meskhidze to use the majority of this time for her Lumen Scholar project. He will also be using the resources to perform simulations that investigate potential selection effects present in ultra-luminous infrared galaxies.

Professor Crider will be using the XSEDE computers to analyze galaxy data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and will be developing training exercises on using this computing cluster for the Modern Astrophysics class.