Madrid, Spain.
An international team of researchers has developed ‘Uchuu‘, The most realistic virtual simulation in the universe achieved so far, and has achieved it thanks to ATERUI II, el Japanese supercomputer most powerful in the world that was built to facilitate the understanding of astronomical phenomena from a theoretical point of view.
This virtual creation, driven by the Japan National Astronomical Observatory (NAOJ) and in the elaboration have participated the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC) and the Center of Supercomputación of Galicia (CESGA) will be at the disposal of the groups of investigation and of CESGA cloud users who want to use it for their studies.
Other research groups from Japan, the United States, Argentina, Australia, Chile, France and Italy.
“We hope that Uchuu allow to study the evolution of the universe with an unprecedented level of detail and volume of information, including the singularity of being able to observe different moments of its temporal dimension, practically from after the Big Bang to the present, ”notes Francisco Prada, an IAA-CSIC researcher.
This simulation consists of 2,097,152,000,000 (2.1 trillion) particles in a 9.630 billion light-year side-by-side cube, a dimension comparable to half the distance between the Earth and the largest galaxies. observed, the CSIC points out in a note.
By Julia Ferrer, researcher at IAA-CSIC which he uses Uchuu to study the large-scale structure of the universe, “no other simulation is capable of displaying so much information while maintaining a high resolution. You usually have to choose between one of the two variables.”
This virtual creation can also simulate the evolution of matter over almost the entire age of the universe: 13.8 billion years of history, Thirty times the time since animal life on Earth first came out of the oceans.
like this, Uchuu it will allow researchers to pose certain scenarios, such as the collision of two black holes in the past, and to study these phenomena without the need to resort to direct observations.
to generate Uchuu the researchers used all the available processors in the supercomputer ATERUI II for a whole year; 40,200 CPU cores working for 48 hours each month to make this project a reality.
As he explains Tomoaki Ishiyama, From the University of Chiba (Japan) and in charge of developing and executing the code that would create this simulation, the result “is 3 petabytes of data, the equivalent of almost a million photos of a 12-megapixel mobile phone.”
To store such an amount of information and compress it into a format that can work even in the cloud, the researchers used high-performance computing techniques.
the CESGA, Mixed Center of the CSIC and the Xunta de Galicia, Has been responsible for hosting all simulation data.
The catalog of Uchuu is now available in the cloud CESGA and it’s totally free.
“We want that Uchuu be available to other research groups who may not have the capacity or money to produce their own simulation. In the end, it’s something that benefits us all, “says Ferrer.
The products generated from this virtual universe will be key to better understanding the mapping of galaxies that will be obtained with the terrestrial experiments DESI and PFS and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid space mission.
The team of Uchuu is also working on a second publication of data that will include catalogs of virtual galaxies and lens maps gravitational.