Argonne National Lab has used supercomputers to model the latest and our most accurate guess as to the shape of our universe and how it developed. The project is called the Hardware / Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code (HACC), an attempt to use supercomputers to model the intricate physics of mass in an expanding universe.
The project tracks roughly 1.1 trillion particles as they expand and cohere, nearly four times larger than the scale of previous simulations. The hope is that by understanding the patterns of matter in the universe, cosmologists can track down the dark matter that experts estimate composes roughly 25 percent of our universe.
Three of the world‘s most powerful supercomputers were used: Titan at OCLF, Sequoia at Lawrence Livermore Lab, and Mira at Argonne Labs. Titan ran at speeds that only one other computer in the world can manage, running at 25 petaflops at peak processing. Researchers are quick to say that what’s happened so far is still just a trial run, designed to test out the architecture’s capabilities. “The hope is that starting in January, we’ll run a mix of medium-sized simulations on Titan along with one or two really large ones,” project leader Salman Habib said.
Source: Oak Ridge Computing Facility
