Argonne National Laboratory, US Dept of Energy
Physicists used 9,000 computing nodes on the Frontier supercomputer to simulate a volume of the expanding Universe measuring more than 31 billion cubic megaparsecs.
“There are two components in the Universe: dark matter — which, as far as we know, only interacts gravitationally — and conventional matter, or atomic matter”, explains the physicist Salman Habibfrom the Argonne National Laboratory, in the USA, to .
So if we want to know what the Universe is doing, we have to simulate these two things: gravity and all the other physics, including hot gas and the formation of stars, black holes and galaxies; the astrophysical “dishwasher”, so to speak. These simulations are what we call cosmological hydrodynamics simulations.”
The project used the Frontier supercomputer to carry out this simulation, which is the largest ever done. The aim of the project, which allows you to input numbers, speed up time, rewind or zoom in and out, is to help astrophysicists understand the evolution and the physics of the Universe.
It took years to perfect the algorithmsthe mathematics and the Hybrid/Hardware Accelerated Cosmology Code needed to run the ExaSky simulation.
But with upgrades that made Frontier the fastest supercomputer in the world at the time, the team was able to increase the size of the simulationof which we can get a glimpse in the video that accompanies one published by the researchers, on the Oak Ridge University website.
It will be some time before we see any simulation-based analyzes published, but this teaser already guess one huge cluster of galaxies coming together in a volume of space measuring 64 by 64 by 76 megaparsecs, or 311,296 cubic megaparsecs.
This volume represents just 0.001% of the entire simulation volume, so we expect to see very impressive results in the future, writes Science Alert.
“It’s not just the size of the physical domain that is needed to make direct comparisons with modern research observations made possible by exascale computing,” says the astrophysicist Bronson Messerfrom Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
“It’s also the added physical realism of including baryons and all the other dynamic physics that makes this simulation a true feat of strength “Stop to Frontier.”
There are still many things that may need to be left out for the sake of efficiency. Previous simulations, for example, had to abandon many of the variables that make up a hydrodynamic simulation.
“If we simulated a large part of the universe studied by one of the large telescopes, such as the Rubin Observatory in Chile, we would be talking about large periods of time — billions of years of expansion“, says Habib. “Until recently, we couldn’t even imagine doing a simulation as large as this, except just in the gravity approximation.”
