What we can see and touch are, in the scheme of the universe, relatively minor components, with visible matter and tangible mass constituting just 16 percent of the universes mass and 30 percent of its energy, respectively. The remainders consist of dark matter and dark energy, which are invisible and intangible making supercomputer simulations an integral part of the investigative workflow for understanding these cosmic forces. Now, a team of researchers from 16 different institutions across five countries has announced the results of the Extreme-Horizon simulation, a massive, supercomputer-powered simulation of the formation of galaxies that tested assumptions about the nature of dark energy and dark matter.

The Extreme-Horizon simulation ran on Joliot-Curie, a supercomputer owned by GENCI and hosted by CEA at TGCC. Among Joliot-Curies four partitions (one Intel Skylake partition, one Intel Knights Landing partition, one AMD Epyc Rome Partition and one Intel Cascade Lake partition), the AMD partition is the most powerful (7.0 Linpack petaflops), placing 38th on the most recent Top500 list of the worlds most powerful publicly ranked supercomputers.

Using Joliot-Curie, the research team simulated how cosmic structures have evolved from the Big Bang through the present day, crunching over three terabytes of data at multiple points throughout the simulation.

Extreme-Horizon yielded some important results for astrophysicists. First, the generally higher resolution meant that Extreme-Horizon was able to paint a picture of how cold gases pooled in galaxies in low-density regions of space and how new galaxies formed in the early days of the post-Big Bang universe.

Second, the simulation produced a correction factor for black holes that obscure our view of intergalactic hydrogen clouds here on Earth. With that correction factor in-hand, astrophysicists will be better able to characterize those clouds and the trends in the distribution of matter in the universe.

Extreme-Horizon is one of the Grand Challenges undertaken by GENCI Frances high-performance computing center to test the abilities of its supercomputing systems. These Grand Challenges represent a unique opportunity for selected scientists to gain access to the supercomputers resources, enabling them to make major advances, or even achieve world firsts, GENCI wrote in a press release.

About the research

The research discussed in this article was published as a letter to the editor titled Formation of compact galaxies in the Extreme-Horizon simulation in the November 2020 issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. 21 authors across 16 institutions in five countries contributed to the letter, which can be read in full at this link.

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GENCI Supercomputer Simulation Illuminates the Dark Universe - HPCwire