ARCHIVED: Petascale computing on the TeraGrid: Toward Petascale Cosmology with GADGET

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Note: The project described in this document is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) to use TeraGrid's petascale environments for highly advanced scientific analysis and simulations that advance the frontiers of scientific and engineering research. For more, see ARCHIVED: Petascale computing on the TeraGrid.

This project will develop a new, petascale-optimized version of the gravity/hydrodynamics code GADGET, the most widely used cosmological simulation code, using an efficient and low-risk incremental strategy. Hybrid shared memory, load balancing and other improvements will allow the new p-GADGET to run on (an order of) a million cores.

p-GADGET will be applied to two fundamental problems for which current numerical methods fall short by a factor of a thousand:

A hydrodynamical simulation capable of studying the formation of the vast range of quasars and galaxies, from the smallest to the rarest and most luminous, using well-tested algorithms for star formation, black hole formation, accretion, and feedback.
A dark matter simulation that fully resolves the mass function of dark matter halos by modeling every single clump that hosts a galaxy. Matching these results to our observed universe will show whether or not we fully understand the astrophysical impact of dark matter on cosmology.

The researchers will make p-GADGET publicly available to help open the domain of efficient petascale science to a wide audience, and add to the user base of petascale resources.

For more, see award abstract #0749212 on the National Science Foundation (NSF) web site.