NCSA Highlights Delta, DeltaAI Role in AI Framework for Astrophysics Workflows
March 23, 2026 — Researchers used the Delta and DeltaAI systems at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) to test a new computational framework that will help scientists explore the universe through multi-messenger astrophysics.
Credit: Shutterstock
Radio Afterglow Detection and AI-driven Response (RADAR) utilizes artificial intelligence to analyze data from both gravitational waves and radio astronomy, improving how scientists study cosmic events such as neutron star mergers. RADAR enables faster, more efficient follow-up examinations, which can be challenging across multiple observatories and datasets.
Gravitational-wave surveys often span large swaths of the sky, radio signals can be extremely faint and delayed, and telescope time and computing resources are limited. As astronomers discover hundreds or thousands of events each year, they need faster, more collaborative systems to analyze the growing data. RADAR tackles these challenges by leveraging AI and supercomputing, analyzing gravitational-wave and radio data directly where they reside and minimizing the need to transfer enormous amounts of data.
“This framework shows how we can do collaborative, cutting-edge astrophysics while respecting data rights and privacy,” said Eliu Huerta, a theoretical physicist and NCSA affiliate. “RADAR is built to grow with the field, ensuring we can meet the challenges of the multi-messenger era.”
Delta and DeltaAI were part of a group of supercomputing resources that a team of researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign used to help build RADAR’s functions and capabilities. The Polaris supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and the Advanced Research Computing at Johns Hopkins University help test the framework, which proved it “can move less data, follow data-access limits and still coordinate large-scale analysis reliably.”
Researchers obtained time on NCSA resources through the U.S. National Science Foundation’s ACCESS program and Illinois Computes.
“The computational resources like Delta and DeltaAI and the allocations on these resources via the national ACCESS program and Illinois Computes are essential, enabling graduate students to develop the software needed for complicated research projects like RADAR,” said Greg Bauer, the technical program manager of the Science and Engineering Application Support (SEAS) group in NCSA’s Research Consulting directorate.
More from HPCwire: Argonne-Led Team Develops AI Framework to Coordinate Gravitational Wave and Radio Observations
About Delta And DeltaAI
NCSA’s Delta and DeltaAI are part of the national cyberinfrastructure ecosystem through the U.S. National Science FoundationACCESS program. Delta (OAC 2005572) is a powerful computing and data-analysis resource combining next-generation processor architectures and NVIDIA graphics processors with forward-looking user interfaces and file systems. The Delta project partners with the Science Gateways Community Institute to empower broad communities of researchers to easily access Delta and with the University of Illinois Division of Disability Resources & Educational Services and the School of Information Sciences to explore and reduce barriers to access. DeltaAI (OAC 2320345) maximizes the output of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) research. Tripling NCSA’s AI-focused computing capacity and greatly expanding the capacity available within ACCESS, DeltaAI enables researchers to address the world’s most challenging problems by accelerating complex AI/ML and high-performance computing applications running terabytes of data. Additional funding for DeltaAI comes from the State of Illinois.
Source: Andrew Helregel, NCSA
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