Dark computations

 

To understand why the universe is expanding, researchers are looking to model a small but significant portion of it, and need a petascale computer to do it.

Salman Habib, of the Los Alamos National Laboratory's Nuclear and Particle Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology group in the US, said: "Because the universe is expanding and at the same time accelerating, either there is a huge gap in our understanding of physics, or there is a strange new form of matter that dominates the universe – 'dark energy' – making up about 70 percent of it.

"In addition, there is five times more of an unknown 'dark matter' than there is ordinary matter in the universe, and we know it's there from many different observations, most spectacularly, we've seen it bend light in pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, but its origin is also not understood."

Habib and team need a computer that can handle petascale computations for this project, and the supercomputer they are to use was the first to exceed a sustained speed of one petaflop, or one million billion calculations per second, in May this year.

The model the team want to create is one of the largest simulations of the distribution of matter in the universe. Their aim is to look at galaxy-scale mass concentrations that are much larger than previously seen in other state-of-the-art sky surveys.

Habib said: "We are trying to really understand how to more completely and more accurately describe the observable universe, so we can help in the design of future experiments and interpret observations from ongoing observations like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III. We are particularly interested in the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) in Chile, in which LANL is an institutional member, and DOE and NASA's Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM).

"To do the science in any sort of reasonable amount of time requires a petascale machine at the least," he added.

On the space side

Meet a Role Model who works as a space consultant.
 

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