Last month, a workforce of researchers put the then-fastest supercomputer on the planet to work on a quite massive quandary: the character of the universe’s atomic and darkish matter.
The supercomputer is named Frontier; not too long ago, a workforce of researchers not too long ago used it to run the biggest astrophysical simulation of the universe but. The supercomputer’s simulation measurement corresponds to surveys taken by massive telescope observatories, which so far had not been potential. The calculations undergirding the simulations present a brand new basis for cosmological simulations of the universe’s matter content material, from all the things we see to the invisible stuff that solely interacts with odd matter gravitationally.
What precisely did the Frontier supercomputer calculate?
Frontier is an exascale-class supercomputer, able to working a quintillion (one billion-billion) calculations per second. In different phrases, a juiced machine worthy of the huge endeavor that’s simulating the physics and evolution of each the identified and unknown universe.
“If we wish to know what the universe is as much as, we have to simulate each of this stuff: gravity in addition to all the opposite physics together with scorching fuel, and the formation of stars, black holes and galaxies,” mentioned Salman Habib, the division director for computational sciences at Argonne National Laboratory, in an Oak Ridge National Laboratory launch. “The astrophysical ‘kitchen sink’ so to talk.”
The matter we find out about—the stuff we will see, from black holes, to molecular clouds, to planets and moons—solely accounts for about 5% of the universe’s content material, in line with CERN. A extra sizable chunk of the universe is barely inferred by gravitational results it appears to have on the seen (or atomic) matter. That invisible chunk is named darkish matter, a catch-all time period for various particles and objects that might be chargeable for about 27% of the universe. The remaining 68% of the universe’s make-up is attributed to darkish power, which is chargeable for the accelerating fee of the universe’s growth.
How does Frontier change our understanding of the universe?
“If we had been to simulate a big chunk of the universe surveyed by one of many huge telescopes such because the Rubin Observatory in Chile, you’re speaking about big chunks of time — billions of years of growth,” Habib mentioned. “Until not too long ago, we couldn’t even think about doing such a big simulation like that besides within the gravity-only approximation.”
In the highest graphic, the left picture exhibits the evolution of the increasing universe over billions of years in a area containing a cluster of galaxies, and the precise picture exhibits the formation and motion of galaxies over time in a single part of that picture.
“It’s not solely the sheer measurement of the bodily area, which is critical to make direct comparability to fashionable survey observations enabled by exascale computing,” mentioned Bronson Messer, the director of science for Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, in a laboratory launch. “It’s additionally the added bodily realism of together with the baryons and all the opposite dynamic physics that makes this simulation a real tour de power for Frontier.”
Frontier is now not the quickest supercomputer on the planet
Frontier is certainly one of a number of exascale supercomputers utilized by the Department of Energy, and contains greater than 9,400 CPUs and over 37,000 GPUs. It resides at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, although the current simulations had been run by Argonne researchers.
The Frontier outcomes had been potential because of the supercomputer’s code, the Hardware/Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code (or HACC). The fifteen-year-old code was up to date as a part of the DOE’s $1.8 billion, eight-year Exascale Computing Project, which concluded this 12 months.
The simulations’ outcomes had been introduced final month, when Frontier was nonetheless the quickest supercomputer on the planet. But shortly after, Frontier was eclipsed by the El Capitan supercomputer because the world’s quickest. El Capitan is verified at 1.742 quintillion calculations per second, with a complete peak efficiency of two.79 quintillion calculations per second, in line with a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory launch.
