Sidney Fernbach award lecture: solving Einstein's equations through computational science

Einstein's equations of general relativity govern such exotic phenomena as black holes, neutron stars, and gravitational waves. Known for nearly a century, they are among the most complex in physics, and require very large scale computational power - which we are just on the verge of achieving - and advanced algorithms, to solve in the general case. I will motivate and describe the structure of these equations, and the worldwide effort to develop advanced and collaborative computational tools utilizing supercomputers, data archives, optical networks, grids, and advanced software to solve them in their full generality. I will focus on applications of these tools to extract new physics of relativistic astrophysical systems. In particular, I will summarize recent progress in the study of black hole collisions, considered to be promising sources of observable gravitational waves that may soon be seen for the first time by the worldwide network of gravitational wave detectors (LIGO, VIRGO, GEO, and others).