Professor Gaurav Khanna

The PhysOrg article Scientists Write Guide to Build Supercomputer from Sony Playstation 3 said

UMass Dartmouth Physics Professor Gaurav Khanna and UMass Dartmouth Principal Investigator Chris Poulin have created a step-by-step guide to building a home-brewed supercomputer that can reduce the cost of university and general computing research.
 
Found at http://www.ps3cluster.org, this resource fully illustrates how to create a fully functioning and high performance supercomputer with the Sony Playstation 3.
 
Last year, Khanna’s construction of a small supercomputer using eight Sony-donated Playstation 3 gaming consoles made headlines nationwide in the scientific community. On the consoles, he is solving complex equations designed to predict the properties of gravitational waves generated by the black holes located at the center of the galaxies.
 
“Science budgets have been significantly dropping over the last decade,”Khanna said. “Here’s a way that people can do science projects less expensively. This new web site will show people how to move forward.”

Gaurav Khanna, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Physics, College of Engineering, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. His research focuses on theoretical and computational astrophysics.
 
Gaurav’s research includes:
 
Coalescence of binary black hole systems using black hole perturbation theory and estimation of the properties of the emitted gravitational radiation — this project is of relevance to the recently established NSF LIGO laboratory and the upcoming ESA/NASA LISA Mission that will be attempting to make a direct observation of this radiation.
 
Loop quantum cosmology — a study of cosmological and black hole models in the context of loop quantum gravity wherein space-time is considered discrete at a very fundamental level.
 
Supercomputing — high performance scientific computation.
 
Gaurav coauthored Computational Efficiency of Frequency— and Time—Domain Calculations of Extreme Mass—Ratio Binaries: Equatorial Orbits, Towards adiabatic waveforms for inspiral into Kerr black holes: II. Dynamical sources and generic orbits, Numerical solutions to lattice-refined models in loop quantum cosmology, Late-time Kerr tails revisited, Lattice refining loop quantum cosmology, anisotropic models, and stability, Towards adiabatic waveforms for inspiral into Kerr black holes: I. A new model of the source for the time domain perturbation equation, and Accurate time-domain gravitational waveforms for extreme-mass-ratio binaries.
 
He earned his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Tech, Kanpur, India in 1995. He earned his Ph.D. in Physics at Pennsylvania State University in 2000.
 
Read Nothing Escapes the Pull of a PlayStation 3, Not Even a Black Hole and Astrophysicist Replaces Supercomputer with Eight PlayStation 3s.