Gregynog Numerical Relativity 2025: Towards the Next Generation is a 3-day meeting, from June 17th to 19th, 2025, to bring together the UKNR community and international leaders in NR, high performance computing, and the major codebases in use today, to take stock of the challenges we currently face in the field of NR. This meeting will lay the foundation for members of the UKNR community to create a roadmap for a Collaborative Computational Project, to address these challenges and advance NR in the UK.

Inspired by the Gregynog Relativity Workshops, which were organized by Bernard Schutz between 1975 and 1995, this meeting will take place at Gregynog Hall, a large historic mansion in the Welsh countryside which was bequeathed to the University of Wales in 1963. The 1986 and 1995 workshops, focusing specifically on the topic of NR, were instrumental in building and strengthening the international NR community, and helped to clarify the roadmap for NR research leading up to the breakthrough solution of the binary black hole problem in 2005.

Over the three days we will seek to

(1) identify the major scientific challenges facing NR over the next two decades, as we prepare for the next generation of GW detectors on Earth and in space, and new breakthroughs and challenges in theoretical physics and cosmology, 

(2) understand the current state and future prospects for numerical methods and computer hardware for NR calculations, and 

(3) gain insight into the scientific computing and funding landscape in the UK, and how the UKNR community can best position itself to continue the pivotal role the UK has had in NR since the pioneering Gregynog NR workshops.

The meeting is funded by a UKRI/STFC Collaborative Computing Communities grant as part of the CoSeC CCP program.

There is no meeting fee and we aim to cover the accommodation costs for up to 30 participants for the nights of June 16th,17th, and 18th, with a maximum of ~50 spaces available in total. Please apply to attend the meeting here. We encourage applications from people at all career stages. After the 30 funded spaces have been allocated, we will offer further spaces at £130 per night per person in an individual room, including meals. We recommend applying early, especially if you are applying for your accommodation to be funded by our grant. We will begin reviewing applications from April 28th but will continue to accept applications until all spaces are taken, or until May 30th, whichever comes first.

The meeting will start at 9am on June 17, so we expect that most attendees will arrive on the evening of June 16 and we will be serving dinner at 7pm on that day. The meeting will end by 4:30pm on June 19.

Please see the Location page here for more information on how to get to Gregynog Hall.

There is a limited amount of additional funding to support early career researchers with their travel, if they would otherwise not be able to attend. Please contact us if you do not have any alternative sources of funding available for your travel costs and would like to come.

We hope to see you in Gregynog!

Scientific organisers: Mark Hannam, Katy Clough, Eugene Lim, Miguel Bezares Figueroa, Ian Hawke, Tobias Weinzierl

Local organisers: Mark Hannam, Rhiannon Silva, Meryl Kinnear

For any enquiries, please contact hannammd@cardiff.ac.uk or silvarl@cardiff.ac.uk