Where Did the Milky Way's Thick Disk Come From?

Sarah Loebman, University of Washington

Usage Details

This project is part of the Blue Waters Student Internship Program. It 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 in the thick disk of the Milky Way galaxy, a region that's evolutionary origin is hotly debated and will be accessible to next-generation instruments. The student will use the BW high-memory nodes in interactive mode to analyze 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 he will also generate visualizations of his scientific findings.