Largest-ever simulation of the universe revealed

December 13, 2011
Matter density

Example of the matter density in the past light cone space. A mock observer is located at the center of the figure. The color scheme varies from blue to red as one goes to larger redshifts. (Credit: Juhan Kim et al.)

Korea Institute for Advanced Study in Seoul scientists have carried out the largest-ever simulation of the universe, consisting of 374 billion particles in a box some 10 gigaparsecs across — about two thirds the size of the observable universe. Technology Review Physics arXiv Blog reports.

This took some 20 days of computing time on the Tachyonii supercomputer in Korea. The purpose: reproduce the entire evolution of a universe made largely of cold dark matter to see whether it produces same structures that we see in ours.

Ref.: Juhan Kim et al., The New Horizon Run Cosmological N-Body Simulations, arxiv.org/abs/1112.1754