An anonymous reader quotes The Next Web:As stunning and ground-breaking as it is, the EHT project is not just about taking on a challenge. It's an unprecedented test of whether Einstein's ideas about the very nature of space and time hold up in extreme circumstances, and looks closer than ever before at the role of black holes in the universe. To cut a long story short: Einstein was right.... His general theory of relativity has passed two serious tests from the universe's most extreme conditions in the last few years. Here, Einstein's theory predicted the observations from M87 with unerring accuracy, and is seemingly the correct description of the nature of space, time, and gravity. The measurements of the speeds of matter around the center of the black hole are consistent with being near the speed of light. The advanced computing research center at the University of Texas at Austin says the data for the photo "was collected during a 2017 global campaign, after decades of scientific, engineering, and computational research and preparation." And their own facility played a role in the finished photo, according to an article shared by aarondubrow:Helping to lay the groundwork for the black hole imaging, and providing the theoretical underpinnings that enabled the researchers to interpret the mass, underlying structure, and orientations of the black hole and its environment, were supercomputers at The University of Texas at Austin's Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) -- Stampede1, Stampede2 and Jetstream -- all three of which were supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), which also provided key funding for the EHT... "We are doing finite difference, three-dimensional simulations with not just gas dynamics, but also magnetic fields," said Harvard University professor and EHT researcher Ramesh Narayan. "That includes radiation and what is called two-temperature physics in a general relativistic framework. For these, we really do need the TACC's Stampede system with lots of cores and lots of hours.... The simulations are computationally very expensive and supercomputers are definitely needed...." Alongside the simulation and modeling effort, another group of researchers from the University of Arizona (UA) were using Jetstream -- a large-scale cloud environment for research located both at TACC and Indiana University -- to develop cloud-based data analysis pipelines that proved crucial for combining huge amounts of data taken from the geographically-distributed observatories, and sharing the data with researchers around the world. "New technologies such as cloud computing are essential to support international collaborations like this," said Chi-kwan Chan, leader of the EHT Computations and Software Working Group and an assistant astronomer at UA. "The production run was actually carried out on Google Cloud, but much of the early development was on Jetstream. Without Jetstream, it is unclear that we would have a cloud-based pipeline at all."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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