Abstract
Advanced Virgo is an interferometer for the detection of gravitational waves at the European Gravitational Observatory in Italy. Along with the two Advanced LIGO interferometers in the US, Advanced Virgo is being used to collect data from astrophysical sources such as compact binary coalescences and is currently running the third observational period, collecting gravitational wave event candidates at a rate of more than once per week. Data from the interferometer are processed by running search pipelines for several expected signals, from coalescing compact binaries to continuous waves and burst events. Furthermore, detector characterisation studies are run. Some of the processing needs to be done with low latency, to be able to provide triggers for other observatories and make multi-messenger observations possible. Deep searches are run offline on external computing centres. Thus, data needs also to be reliably and promptly distributed from the EGO site to computer centres in Europe and the US for further analysis and archival storage. Two of the defining characteristics of Virgo computing are the heterogeneity of the activities and the need to interoperate with LIGO. A very wide array of analysis pipelines differing in scientific target, implementation details and running environment assumptions have to be allowed to run ubiquitously and uniformly on dedicated resources and, in perspective, on heterogeneous infrastructures. The current status, possible strategies and outlook of Virgo computing are discussed.
Highlights
Gravitational-Wave (GW) Astronomy was born on September 14, 2015, when two detectors comprising the US Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) observed GW from a pair of colliding black holes [1]
An electromagnetic counterpart was observed by several land- and satellite-based observatories: that was the first occurrence of a new type of multimessenger astronomy [2]
Advanced Virgo (AdV) low-latency data are transferred in quasi-real-time to Advanced LIGO (aLIGO) computing centres and the other way around so that low-latency searches can be performed on data from all the three interferometers
Summary
Gravitational-Wave (GW) Astronomy was born on September 14, 2015, when two detectors comprising the US Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) observed GW from a pair of colliding black holes [1]. The joint discovery of a merging binary neutron star by Advanced LIGO (aLIGO) and Advanced Virgo (AdV) on August 17, 2017 triggered an electromagnetic follow-up of the source. An electromagnetic counterpart was observed by several land- and satellite-based observatories: that was the first occurrence of a new type of multimessenger astronomy [2]. Since the aLIGO and AdV interferometers have detected many more GW event candidates, at a nearly weekly rate during the last observation period (lasting from May 2019 to April 2020). The expected event rate scales with the cube of the sensitivity improvement, so the Collaboration is enhancing and consolidating its computing infrastructure to be able to cope with the increased processing demands
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