The Frontier supercomputer’s calculations provide a new foundation for simulating the universe’s conventional physics, but also the enigmatic behaviors and properties of dark matter.
Last month, a team of researchers put the then-fastest supercomputer in the world to work on a rather large quandary: the nature of the universe’s atomic and dark matter.
The supercomputer is called Frontier; recently, a team of researchers recently used it to run the largest astrophysical simulation of the universe yet. The supercomputer’s simulation size corresponds to surveys taken by large telescope observatories, which to this point had not been possible. The calculations undergirding the simulations provide a new foundation for cosmological simulations of the universe’s matter content, from everything we see to the invisible stuff that only interacts with ordinary matter gravitationally.What exactly did the Frontier supercomputer calculate?
Frontier is an exascale-class supercomputer, capable of running a quintillion (one billion-billion) calculations per second. In other words, a juiced machine worthy of the vast undertaking that is simulating the physics and evolution of both the known and unknown universe.
“If we want to know what the universe is up to, we need to simulate both of these things: gravity as well as all the other physics including hot gas, and the formation of stars, black holes and galaxies,” said Salman Habib, the division director for computational sciences at Argonne National Laboratory, in an Oak Ridge National Laboratory release.
