The Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the USA has performed the largest universe simulation ever performed.
In November 2024, physicists used the Frontier supercomputer’s 9,000 computing nodes to model a section of the expanding universe measuring 31 billion cubic megaparsecs. The project, called ExaSky, offers astrophysicists and cosmologists new perspectives to better understand dark matter and other physical processes of the universe.
Physicist Salman Habib from Argonne National Laboratory said that the universe has two main components, “Dark matter, which interacts only with gravity, and atomic matter as we know it. If we want to understand how the universe works, we need to model both gravity and other physical processes such as the formation of stars, black holes, and galaxies. “Such studies are called cosmological hydrodynamic simulations,” he said.
It is stated that such modeling aims to shed light on the evolution process of the universe over billions of years. But to perform this type of simulation, both complex mathematical models and the world’s fastest supercomputer are needed.
Emphasizing that these limits have been exceeded with the opportunities provided by Frontier, Habib said, “We are no longer satisfied with just gravity simulations to model huge parts of the universe, as examined by large telescopes, such as the Rubin Observatory in Chile. “The ExaSky project combines such massive simulations with physical realism,” he said.
