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D.E. Winget, T.S. Metcalfe (The University of Texas at Austin)
White dwarf asteroseismology offers the opportunity to probe the structure and composition of stellar objects governed by relatively simple principles. The observational requirements of asteroseismology have been addressed by the development of the Whole Earth Telescope (WET), but the analytical procedures need to be refined before this technique can yield all of the physical insight that the data promise. We have applied an optimization method utilizing a genetic algorithm (GA) for fitting white dwarf pulsation models to asteroseismolgical data. We are using this global approach to investigate the completeness and adequacy of our understanding of the principles governing white dwarf interiors by parameterizing the constitutive physics of our models and using a GA to search for all of the solutions that produce observationally indistinguishable behavior. To make these calculations practical, we have configured a specialized computational instrument---a metacomputer (consisting of a network of minimal PCs running Linux) capable of ~3 GigaFLOPS (billion floating-point operations per second).