This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have completed two of the largest cosmological simulations ever performed.
Each simulation modeled the evolution of 13.4 trillion dark matter particles across a region 28.6 billion light-years wide. Dark matter is invisible to telescopes, but its gravitational effects drive galaxy formation and shape larger-scale structures in the universe. In the simulations, particles stand in as tracers of the dark matter density and velocity distributions.
This allows researchers to trace how cosmic structure has evolved over billions of years. Simulations at this scale require enormous computing power. The team performed the calculations on Argonne's Aurora exascale machine.
One of the world's largest supercomputers, the system has 10,624 nodes and 63,744 graphics processing units (GPUs). Aurora is housed at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), a DOE Office of Science user facility. The team's simulations used a significant portion of the system.
Each run drew on 8,100 nodes and roughly 50,000 GPUs. The simulations and much of the data analysis were completed in about four days. Led by Argonne computational scientist Nicholas Frontiere, the project seeks to shed light on the physics of cosmic inflation.
"The theory describes a brief burst of rapid expansion in the very early universe," Frontiere said. "Inflation is thought to have stretched microscopic quantum fluctuations to cosmological scales, leaving tiny variations in density that gravity later amplified into the cosmic web we observe today." But the physics behind inflation remains uncertain. By studying how matter is distributed across the cosmos, scientists can look for clues that may reveal more about inflation and the early universe.
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