Can we detect the edge of the Milky Way?

Robyn Sanderson, California Institute of Technology

Usage Details

This project will make use of Blue Waters' resources to test parallelization schemes for the rapid generation of synthetic star catalogs from state-of-the-art, ultra-high-resolution cosmological simulations of Milky Way-like galaxies. Starting with an existing serial code for generating star catalogs, the student will use openMP to implement and evaluate different parallelization schemes, and benchmark the parallel code's performance in preparation for incorporation into an online data server for on-demand catalog generation. The student will generate a set of star catalogs using the new parallelized code that will be used to make predictions for the types of stars future observations should expect to discover at the very edge of the Milky Way galaxy, a region about which very little is currently known but that will be accessible to next-generation instruments. The student will use the BW high-memory nodes in interactive mode to analyse the catalogs (which will be as large or larger than the ~20GB simulation files from which they are generated) to answer the scientific question posed in the title. If time allows she will also generate visualizations of her scientific findings.