An international team led by Chinese researchers has released a cosmological simulation named "HyperMillennium," described as the largest of its kind to date.
Scope and Technical Specifications
The simulation covers a cubic volume with a side length of 12 billion light-years. It utilizes 4.2 trillion virtual dark matter particles within an N-body numerical simulation framework to recreate the gravitational interactions of cosmic structures starting from shortly after the Big Bang.
The project was executed using software called PhotoNs, which was developed by the team and optimized for China's domestic supercomputers. The computation required over 10,000 accelerator cards and consumed more than 100 million CPU core-hours and 10 million accelerator-card hours. The total volume of raw and processed data generated amounts to approximately 13 petabytes.
"The simulation was completed with high force resolution and time accuracy and represents a breakthrough in computational scale." — Wang Qiao, National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC)
Scientific Purpose and Applications
The simulation provides a virtual catalog of galaxy positions, brightness, and other properties. It is intended to support research into the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Additionally, the simulation is designed to aid upcoming galaxy survey programs, including the China Space Station Telescope and the European Space Agency's Euclid mission.
Verification and Publication
The research team compared the simulation's results with observational data of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744. According to the team, the simulation achieved a pixel-level match with these observations, which they state confirms the accuracy of the standard cosmological model in complex environments such as colliding galaxy clusters.
The first research paper detailing the simulation has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Data Availability
The first batch of simulation data has been made available to the global scientific community via the National Astronomical Data Center.
Statements from Researchers
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Wang Qiao, a researcher at the National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC), stated that the simulation allows scientists to study "extremely rare, massive cosmic structures in fine detail while maintaining strong statistical power."
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Mike Boylan-Kolchin, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, described the simulation as a "computational marvel" that will help "unlock secrets of dark energy and the early universe."
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Volker Springel, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, said the simulation "redefines the limits of numerical cosmology" and that he was "extremely impressed" by the team's effort.