When a supercomputer recreates the Universe: the most ambitious simulation ever made

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While the most powerful observatories scan the confines of space, the Frontier supercomputer has just accomplished an incredible feat: model the complete evolution of our Universe, from its smallest components to its largest structures. A real turning point for digital cosmology, because until then, scientists had to make do with partial simulations, unable to simultaneously reproduce all the physical phenomena that make up our cosmos.

A titanic computing power

Frontier is not a supercomputer like the others. Located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Tennessee, USA), it deploys a dizzying computational architecture: more than 9,400 central processing units (CPUs) and 37,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) work together to perform a quintillion operations per second. A quintillion is a 1 followed by 18 zeros! This means that the computer can perform a billion billion mathematical operations every second.

Even if the comparison may seem irrelevant, it is interesting to imagine the power of this machine: Frontier is millions, even billions of times more powerful than a high-end PC intended for the general public.

To carry out these complex simulations, the researchers used a very special computer code called HACC (Hardware/Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code). The result of 15 years of development, it has just been optimized as part of a $1.8 billion government project, the Exascale Computing Project, led by the US Department of Energy.

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Dark matter, dark energy, stars: the Universe recreated in detail

With this exceptional computing power, the researchers have succeeded in simulating the entire Universe. Salman Habib, director of the Computational Sciences Division at Argonne National Laboratory explains: “To understand the Universe, we need to model both gravity and all the other physical processes, including hot gas, the formation of stars, black holes and galaxies“.

The simulation thus integrates the three fundamental components of the cosmos: ordinary matter, representing 5% of the Universe, dark matter (27%) whose influence is only detectable by its gravitational effects, and dark energy (68%) responsible for the accelerated expansion of the Universe. This modeling corresponds to observations from large telescopes such as the Rubin Observatory in Chile, allowing for the first time a direct confrontation between theory and observation.

The results of Frontier could notably shed light on one of the greatest enigmas of modern cosmology: the nature of dark matter and its role in the formation of galactic structures. By allowing the exploration of complex cosmological scenarios on time scales of several billion years, Frontier is now the perfect tool to decipher the laws that govern our Universe, from the infinitely small to the infinitely large.

• The Frontier supercomputer has modeled the entire evolution of the Universe, a first in digital cosmology.
• With 9,400 CPUs, 37,000 GPUs, and a quintillion operations per second, Frontier is a powerhouse.
• With it, scientists will be able to confront their theoretical models with live observations made by observatories.

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