Simulation of gravitational wave detectors

A simulation program that provides insight into the vibrational properties of resonant mass gravitational radiation antennas is developed from scratch. The requirements that are set necessitate the use of an explicit finite element kernel. Since the computational complexity of this kernel requires significant computing power, it is tailored for execution on parallel computer systems. After validating the physical correctness of the program as well as the performance on distributed memory architectures, we present a number of ''sample'' simulation experiments to illustrate the simulation capabilities of the program. The development path of the code,consisting of problem definition, mathematical modeling, choosing an appropriate solution method, parallelization, physical validation, and performance validation, is argued to be typical for the design process of large-scale complex simulation codes. (C) 1997 American Institute of Physics.