SPACE — Astronomers performed the largest supercomputer simulation ever. Astronomers simulate the evolution of the universe, from the Big Bang to the present.
This project, named Flamingo, calculates the evolution of all components of the universe consisting of ordinary matter, dark matter and dark energy.
The simulated data comes from the Euclid Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. The telescopes collect data about galaxies, quasars and stars.
The researchers hope this simulation will allow them to compare the virtual universe with real observations captured by the new high-powered telescope.
This can help scientists understand whether the standard models of cosmology that often explain the evolution of the universe are a good description of the reality of the universe.
“We have amazing new data from powerful telescopes some of which, at first glance, does not match our theoretical expectations,” said Flamingo research collaborator Professor Carlos Frenk, from Durham University, as reported by Belfast Telegraph.
Previous simulations, which were compared with observations of the universe, focused on cold dark matter which is believed to be a key component of the structure of the cosmos. Although dark matter dominates gravity, the contribution of ordinary matter can no longer be ignored.
Astronomers now say that the influence of ordinary matter and neutrinos also needs to be taken into account when trying to understand the nature of the universe. Ordinary matter makes up only 16 percent of all matter in the universe. Meanwhile, neutrinos are small particles that rarely interact with normal matter.
The researchers ran simulations on a powerful supercomputer in Durham over the past two years.
This simulation took more than 50 million processor hours on the Cosmology Machine (COSMA 8) supercomputer. This simulation was hosted by the Institute for Computational Cosmology, Durham University, on behalf of the DiRAC High-Performance Computing facility in the UK.
To carry out this simulation, the researchers developed a code called SWIFT. This code distributes computing work across the computer’s 65 thousand CPU units.
Flamingo is a Virgo Consortium project for cosmological supercomputer simulations. Funding for this project came from the European Research Council, the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, and the Swiss National Science Foundation.
This research was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
2023-10-24 03:30:00
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