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2015

In Australia, HPC Illuminates the Early Universe

Unraveling the story of how we got from there to here isn’t an easy task, with many simulations of large swaths of the universe taking years to complete on powerful supercomputers.

• https://www.hpcwire.com/2020/05/11/in-australia-hpc-illuminates-the-early-universe/

The galaxy builders

Galaxy simulations are finally producing realistic results—and surprising insights into the evolution of the universe.

• http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/954.full

Galaxy simulations are at last matching reality—and producing surprising insights into cosmic evolution

For decades, scientists have tried to simulate how the trillions of galaxies in the observable universe arose from clouds of gas after the big bang. But in the past few years, thanks to faster computers and better algorithms, the simulations have begun to produce results that accurately capture both the details of individual galaxies and their overall distribution of masses and shapes.

• http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/galaxy-simulations-are-last-matching-reality-and-producing-surprising-insights-cosmic

UIUC’s Supercomputer Has a Projected $1B Impact On Illinois’ Economy

Nestled on the outskirts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus — at the corner of Oak Street and St. Mary’s Road — is Blue Waters, a supercomputer that was first instituted as a result of a 2007 National Science Foundation grant and an initial $60 million investment from the State of Illinois. A report released this past week on the economic impact of this supercomputer — on the UIUC campus, its five surrounding counties, as well as nationwide spillover effects — puts a whole new meaning to the term “return on investment.”

• https://www.americaninno.com/chicago/uiucs-supercomputer-has-a-projected-1b-impact-on-illinois-economy/

Blue Waters Study Dives Deep into Performance Details

If you’ve wondered about what, exactly, NCSA supercomputer Blue Waters has been doing since being fired up in 2013, a new report is full of details around workloads, CPU/GPU use patterns, memory and I/O issues, and a plethora of other metrics. Released in March, the study – Final Report: Workload Analysis of Blue Waters – provides a wealth of information around demand and performance. Blue Waters has supplied roughly 17.3 billion core hours to scientists to date.

• https://www.hpcwire.com/2017/05/02/blue-waters-study-dives-deep-performance-details/

Workload study: Blue Waters enables large-scale science

A technical report analyzing use and performance of NCSA's Blue Waters supercomputer and all the scientific applications it has run—from its launch in April 2013, until September 2016—shows Blue Waters has spent the majority of its computing time solving large-scale scientific applications. These include projects like understanding the 160-million-atom flu virus capsid, or creating high resolution 3D maps of the Arctic from massive amounts of satellite data. The paper also shows many of these large applications could only be performed on Blue Waters. Blue Waters is housed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is the largest leadership-class supercomputer funded by the National Science Foundation.

• http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/news/story/workload_study_blue_waters_enables_large_scale_science

Simulating the Early Universe

A new, large-scale computer simulation has shown for the first time that large disk galaxies, much like our own Milky Way, may have existed in the early days of the universe. The simulation, created by physicists at Carnegie Mellon University’s McWilliams Center for Cosmology and the University of California Berkeley, shows that the early universe —500 million years after the Big Bang — might have had more order and structure than previously thought. Their findings, which will be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, will help guide researchers using next-generation telescopes like the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as they search the sky for evidence of the first galaxies.

• http://www.labmanager.com/news/2015/08/simulating-the-early-universe?fw1pk=2#.WjLMIo-cGEV

Forming Disk Galaxies Early in the Universe

What were galaxies like in the first 500 million years of the universe? According to simulations by Yu Feng (UC Berkeley) and collaborators, the earliest massive galaxies to form were mostly disk-shaped, rather than the compact clumps previously predicted. Current models for galaxy formation predict that small perturbations in the distribution of matter in the early universe collapsed to form very compact, irregular, clumpy first galaxies. Observations support this: the furthest out that we’ve spotted disk-shaped galaxies is at z=3, whereas the galaxies we’ve observed from earlier times — up to redshifts of z=8–10 — are very compact.

• http://aasnova.org/2015/08/05/forming-disk-galaxies-early-in-the-universe/

BlueTides on Blue Waters: The First Galaxies

In this special guest feature, Dr. Stephen Perrenod writes that astrophysicists have completed one of the largest cosmological simulations ever on the Blue Waters supercomputer at NCSA. The largest high-redshift cosmological simulation of galaxy formation ever has been recently completed by a group of astrophysicists (Drs. Feng, Di-Matteo, Croft, Bird, and Battaglia) from the U.S. and the U.K. This tour-de-force simulation was performed on the Blue Waters Cray XE/XK system at NCSA and employed 648,000 cores. They utilized approximately 700 billion particles (!) to represent dark matter and ordinary matter and to create virtual galaxies inside the supercomputer. The authors, who represent Carnegie Mellon University, UC Berkeley, Princeton University, and the University of Sussex, have given their simulation the moniker BlueTides.

• https://insidehpc.com/2015/05/bluetides-on-blue-waters-the-first-galaxies/