The Binary Black Hole Grand Challenge Alliance

The Binary Black Hole Grand Challenge Alliance consists of Principal Investigators at nine institutions and Associates at two others, as well as students postdocs and collaborators. Richard Matzner, The University of Texas at Austin, is the lead Principal Investigator.

The stated purposes of the Binary Black Hole Grand Challenge Alliance are:

• To develop a problem solving environment for the Nonlinear Einstein equations describing General Relativity, including a dynamical adaptive multilevel parallel infrastructure.
• To provide controllable convergent algorithms to compute gravitational waveforms which arise from Black Hole encounters, and which are relevant to astrophysical events and may be used to predict signals which for detection by future ground-, and space-, based detectors. This code will be made available to researchers in Computational Relativity (by publication and via the World Wide Web).
• To provide representative examples of computational waveforms.

To achieve these goals the Alliance has established an external Advisory Committee. Additionally, an internal advisory committee, the "Super-Cognizant Scientists" advises the lead PI, and meetings of the Principal Investigators are held at each 6-monthly meeting of the Alliance. An additional structure consists of a team of cognizant scientists each of which is directly responsible for the scientific progress of a particular aspect of the Alliance effort. They submit monthly reports to the newsletter Editor, and the newsletter is circulated among the Alliance, and published on the Web.