By MARK JOHNSON
markjohnson@journalsentinel.com
Posted: March 9, 2008
From outside Room 223, you can hear Nemo roar.
Open the door and a deafening drone emanates from 780 gleaming metallic computers and the fans tirelessly cooling them, and the air conditioners keeping the whole room from cooking like a hundred space heaters. Blue lights blink like distant stars from one group of computers; green lights blink from another. The machines in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's physics building have been networked together to form the supercomputer dubbed Nemo.
Nemo represents mankind's best effort to find a gravitational wave.
