Understanding Dark Energy Using the Roadrunner Supercomputer

New results from the Roadrunner Universe Project -- As part of the Roadrunner Open Science Runs over the summer this year, some of the world's largest cosmology simulations have been carried out. A team of scientists from ISR-, T-, and CCS-Division developed the first cosmological simulation code to run on future hybrid high-performance architectures and carried out nine simulations with 64 billion particles each on Roadrunner. The analysis of these ultra-large simulations has just been finished. In collaboration with researchers from UC Berkeley, baryon acoustic oscillation features in the inter-galactic medium have been studied from these simulations. The measurement of baryon acoustic oscillations is one of the most promising methods to further our understanding of dark energy and a major target of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. The Roadrunner simulations can for the first time simultaneously resolve the Jeans scale of the intergalactic gas while covering the large volumes required to adequately sample the acoustic feature. The results have been submitted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. (LA-UR 10-00172) See more about Los Alamos National Laboratory research at http://www.lanl.gov

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Science & Technology

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• baryon
• LANL
• cosmology
• science
• Roadrunner
• supercomputer