The world's fastest supercomputer, Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has recently unveiled the largest-ever simulation of the universe!. This groundbreaking simulation models both atomic matter and dark matter across vast universe-sized scales.
In early November 2024, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory used Frontier, the fastest supercomputer on the planet, to run the largest astrophysical simulation of the universe ever conducted.
Frontier can perform up to 1.1 exaFLOPS (1.1 quintillion calculations per second). The Hardware/Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code (HACC) was used, which models the evolution of the universe.
The simulation tracks the formation and movement of galaxies over billions of years. This simulation will help match observational data with theoretical models, providing deeper insights into cosmic structures and the role of dark matter.
In the video below, it shows the formation of the largest object in the Frontier-E simulation. The left panel shows a 64x64x76 Mpc/h subvolume of the simulation (roughly 1e-5 the full simulation volume) around the large object, with the right panel providing a closer look. In each panel, we show the gas density field colored by its temperature. In the right panel, the white circles show star particles and the open black circles show AGN particles.
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