NASA Supercomputer Enables Largest Cosmological Simulations

Scientists have generated the largest and most realistic cosmological simulations of the evolving universe to-date, thanks to NASA’s powerful Pleiades supercomputer. Using the "Bolshoi" simulation code, researchers hope to explain how galaxies and other very large structures in the universe changed since the Big Bang.

To complete the enormous Bolshoi simulation, which traces how largest galaxies and galaxy structures in the universe were formed billions of years ago, astrophysicists at New Mexico State University Las Cruces, New Mexico and the University of California High-Performance Astrocomputing Center (UC-HIPACC), Santa Cruz, Calif. ran their code on Pleiades for 18 days, consumed millions of hours of computer time, and generating enormous amounts of data. Pleiades is the seventh most powerful supercomputer in the world.

“NASA installs systems like Pleiades, that are able to run single jobs that span tens of thousands of processors, to facilitate scientific discovery,” said William Thigpen, systems and engineering branch chief in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at NASA's Ames Research Center.