24C3: Simulating the Universe on Supercomputers

Speaker: Mark Vogelsberger


The evolution of cosmic structure


The evolution of structure in the Universe is one of the hottest topics in Cosmology and Astrophysics. In the last years the so-called $\Lambda$-CDM-model could be established also with great help of very large computer simulations. This model describes a Universe that consists mainly of dark components: 96% are made of dark energy and dark matter. Ordinary matter made up of baryons give only 4% to the total content of the Universe. The talk will present recent results with the main focus on computational methods and challenges in that field. A state-of-the-art computer code for running these calculations will be presented in detail.

The talk will describe recent progress in the field of cosmic structure formation and will mainly focus on computational problems and methods carrying out such large simulations on the fastest Supercomputers available today. At the end of the talk I will also briefly discuss a new method we developed to access the dark matter structure in the Milky way to a scale that was just impossible some month ago with current Supercomputers.


The talk will mainly focus on numerical techniques how to run such a simulation. As an example the state-of-the-art code Gadget (Springel, 2005) will be presented. This code was used to calculate the Millennium Simulation. It is at the moment the leading code for cosmological simulations.

At the end of the talk a new method will be presented that increases the resolution of all simulations done so far by an enormous factor.

For more information visit: http://bit.ly/24c3_information
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Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• universe
• simulation
• structure
• computer