This visualization of the Universe as it condenses around fluctuations in the density of dark and ordinary matter is a result from a collaboration between Argonne National Laboratory and the San Diego Supercomputer Center/University of California, San Diego. It is part of an effort to establish end-to-end workflows that leverage high-performance computing and visualization resources, high-speed networks, and advanced displays spread across the country. These workflows include automatically creating visualizations from simulation data as it is generated, and enabling researchers to remotely view and control these visualizations on ultra high-resolution displays.
What am I looking at?
This simulation follows the growth of density perturbations in both gas and dark matter components in a volume 1 billion light years on a side beginning shortly after the Big Bang and evolved to near the present age of the universe. It calculates the gravitational clumping of intergalactic gas and dark matter modeled using a computational grid of 8 billion cells and 8 billion dark matter particles. The simulation uses a computational grid of 2048^3 cells and took over 1,000,000 CPU hours to complete.
The visualization shows the density value, whose range spans over 6 orders of magnitude (6.78e-33 g/cm^3 to 1.43e-26 g/cm^3). This is from the final time step of the simulation, which is at a redshift of a few percent (z=0.025).
Acknowledgments
Science:
- Michael L. Norman, San Diego Supercomputer Center/University of California, San Diego
- Robert Harkness, San Diego Supercomputer Center/University of California, San Diego
- Pascal Paschos, San Diego Supercomputer Center/University of California, San Diego
- Rick Wagner, San Diego Supercomputer Center/University of California, San Diego
Visualization:
- Mark Hereld, Argonne National Laboratory
- Joseph A. Insley, Argonne National Laboratory
- Eric C. Olson, University of Chicago
- Michael E. Papka, Argonne National Laboratory
The simulation was done as part of the 2006 SciDAC INCITE award, “Precision Cosmology Using the Lyman Alpha Forest”, and used resources from the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.
This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under cooperative agreements OCI-0504086 and OCI-0503697, and in part by the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract DE-AC02-06CH11357 including resources of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility at Argonne National Laboratory.
Download
The full res movie (1920×1080, 239MB) and a tar file with several resolutions (44MB) (for desktop, iphone, etc.) of the movie that can easily be posted within a web page are now available. The tar file also includes a ReadMe.html with directions for putting it on the web, with code that checks the type of device you are browsing the page from and points to the appropriate version of the movie.
For more information contact us at fl-info [at] mcs [dot] anl [dot] gov.
© 2012