The JETSET team congratulates with its P.I. Prof. Rezzolla for winning the 2024 edition of the PRACE HPC Excellence Award for his and his team’s efforts to construct an entirely novel approach for the theoretical interpretation of the first images of a supermassive black hole taken by the international Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration.
Producing for the first time a theoretical interpretation of images that have never been taken before is a scientific challenge that is an order of magnitude greater than “merely” pushing a well-known technique beyond its previous limit. Prof. Luciano Rezzolla, supported by his group and his colleagues at ETH, rose to this challenge and met it with success through a “never-attempted-before” approach consisting of three separate challenges.
The first was to develop a new infrastructure that would be able to provide a realistic description of the plasma dynamics near an accreting black hole under a large variety of astrophysical and gravitational conditions via general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (GRMHD) simulations. Following on that, the second challenge revolved around developing a new and distinct computational infrastructure that would import the results of the GRMHD simulations and produce a vast library of synthetic images as might be captured by an observer on Earth without knowing how this observer would be oriented, relative to the source. Finally, third and novel computational infrastructure needed to be developed: one that would compare the handful images obtained from the observations with the millions of theoretical images that are physically and mathematically consistent but not necessarily reflecting reality.
While all this sounds relatively straightforward when written down like above, for quite some time during the analysis, it was not clear whether the construction of this theoretical framework would eventually yield the results that Prof. Rezzolla and his team were aiming for.
High Performance Computing (HPC) been essential for this breakthrough: without top-tier European HPC resources analysis of the ETH images would not have been possible: the data captured by the ETH would have remained mere images, and the understanding that Prof. Rezzolla’s work of five years has now brought, would have remained unattainable.
The PRACE HPC Excellence Award 2024 has been presented to Prof. Rezzolla at the PRACE Intersection Seminar, on 4 and 5 February 2025 in Brussels, Belgium. He presented his work in a keynote speech entitled ‘How HPC made it possible to take a photo of a black hole’ at that event.