Pleiades Cluster
Penn State is home to three of the 200 fastest computers in the world. One of those – the Pleiades Cluster – is owned by the Physics Departments Gravity Group and is dedicated to the analysis of data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), whose goal is the detection of gravitational waves and their use as a new tool of astronomical discovery. Pleiades is just one part of the International Virtual Data Grid Laboratory, an international computational laboratory of unprecedented scale and scope, comprised of heterogeneous computing and storage resources in the U.S. and world-wide, linked by high-speed networks and operated as a single system for the purposes of interdisciplinary experimentation in Grid-enabled, data-intensive scientific computing.
More about the Plieades Cluster.