The universe just got a whole lot bigger—or at least in the world of computer simulations, that is. In early November, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory used the fastest supercomputer on the planet to run the largest astrophysical simulation of the universe ever conducted.
The achievement was made using the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The calculations set a new benchmark for cosmological hydrodynamics simulations and provide a new foundation for simulating the physics of atomic matter and dark matter simultaneously. The simulation size corresponds to surveys undertaken by large telescope observatories, a feat that until now has not been possible at this scale.
“There are two components in the universe: dark matter —which as far as we know, only interacts gravitationally—and conventional matter, or atomic matter,” said project lead Salman Habib, division director for Computational Sciences at Argonne.
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