The Aurora supercomputer ran two cosmological simulations of 13.4 trillion dark matter particles each
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
Computing on tens of thousands of graphics cards makes it possible to test ideas about the early Universe.
According to Argonne National Laboratory (as relayed by iXBT), each simulation covered a region 28.6 billion light-years across, used about 8,100 nodes and 50,000 graphics processors, and the calculations and much of the analysis took about four days. The goal is to look for deviations from the standard statistical distribution of initial fluctuations that could help distinguish competing models of cosmic inflation. Project lead Nicholas Frontiere says the expected signal is weak, and measurements are limited by cosmic variance.
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