The Bolshoi supercomputer simulation, announced Thursday, is the most accurate and detailed large cosmological simulation run to date, giving physicists and astronomers a powerful new tool for understanding such cosmic mysteries as galaxy formation, dark matter, and dark energy.
The Bolshoi code took 18 days and millions of hours of computer time split up among more than 160,000 processors to finish running on Pleiades, which is the seventh most powerful supercomputer in the world.
The Bolshoi simulation clock started about 24 million years after the
Big Bang, based on a highly accurate calculation of the evolution of the
universe to that time. The Bolshoi simulation then followed the
evolution of 8.6 billion particles, each particle representing an amount
of dark matter with a mass about 200 million times the mass of the sun
(about 1/5000th [??] the mass of the Milky Way dark matter halo). 180
times during the simulated evolution of the universe, the resulting
picture of all the dark matter particles and their motions was captured
and stored like a frame in a monumental three-dimensional movie. These
stored time steps will allow astrophysicists to explore the
three-dimensional model of the universe and study how dark matter halos,
their galaxies, and clusters of galaxies coalesced and evolved.
Click to watch an animation below.
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