Supercomputers help peel back the darkness on M87

aarondubrow writes: Supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) made vital contributions to the first-ever image of a black hole in the galaxy M87. Those systems helped lay the groundwork for black hole imaging, and provided the theoretical foundation that allowed scientists to read the mass, underlying structure, and orientations of the black hole and its environment. Using data collected by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a global network of radio telescopes, research teams employed TACC's Stampede1 and Stampede2 supercomputers to three-dimensionally simulate the physical properties of M87, and predict observational features of the black hole. Further models rendered the dynamics of the phenomenon into an image of how it would appear from Earth, using ray-tracing methods. Another team used TACC's Jetstream cloud environment to develop cloud-based data analysis pipelines, used to combine massive EHT data troves, and to share the data worldwide.