I am IT consultant at the Center for Computation & Technology at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, performing research in numerical relativity and creating the software infrastructure necessary to support above research.

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Projects and Collaborations

I am leading the Einstein Toolkit, which provides a complete, open-source, production-level infrastructure for general relativistic hydrodynamics, in large parts building upon the Cactus framework. It currently has more than 65 members from over 28 research groups world-wide.

XiRel/CIGR is developing a highly scalable, efficient and accurate adaptive mesh refinement layer for the Cactus Framework, based on the Carpet driver, and optimized and supported for numerical relativitists studying the physics of black holes, neutron stars, and gravitational waves.

Carpet is and mesh refinement infrastructure for the Cactus framework. Carpet supports adaptive mesh refinement (AMR), multiple grid patches, is parallelised using MPI, and runs on most existing computer architectures. It supports hybrid parallelisation combining MPI and OpenMP in support of the modern multi-core architectures. Carpet is mature and scales to more than 10k processors.

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Recent Publications

• Ashley Zebrowski, Frank Löffler, and Erik Schnetter. The BL-Octree: An Efficient Data Structure for Discretized Block-Based Adaptive Mesh Refinement. In ParCo2011: Proceeings of the 2011 International Conference on Parallel Computing, Prof. Dr Frans J. Peters, Poolsterlaan 6, 5632 AN Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 2011. ParCo Conferences.
• Frank Löffler, Gabrielle Allen, Werner Benger, Andrei Hutanu, Shantenu Jha, and Erik Schnetter. Using the TeraGrid to teach Scientific Computing. In TG '11: Proceedings of the 2011 TeraGrid Conference, New York, NY, USA, 2011. ACM.
• Steven R. Brandt, Frank Löffler, Jian Tao, Erik Schnetter, Ian Hinder, Dennis Castleberry, and Michael Thomas. The prickly pear archive. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Science (ICCS), pages 750–758, 2011.
• Gabrielle Allen, Werner Benger, Andrei Hutanu, Shantenu Jha, Frank Löffler, and Erik Schnetter. A practical and comprehensive graduate course preparing students for research involving scientific computing. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2011, pages 1927–1936. Procedia Computer Science, Jan 2011. (doi:10.1016/j.procs.2011.04.210)

Recent Talks

• Frank Löffler. Using the TeraGrid to Teach Scientific Computing. TeraGrid 2011 conference, July 2011.
• Frank Löffler. How to become a numerical astrophysicist. REU seminar at Louisiana State University, July 2011.
• Frank Löffler. The Einstein Toolkit. Workshop: Advances and Challenges in Computational General Relativity, Brown University, RI, May 2011.
• Frank Löffler. The Einstein Toolkit. APS Gulf Coast Gravity Meeting, Florida Atlantic University, May 2011.
• Frank Löffler. Constructing better initial data for compact binary systems containing matter. APS April Meeting, Anaheim, CA, May 2011.