While the most powerful observatories scan the ends of space, the Frontier supercomputer has just accomplished an incredible feat : model the complete evolution of our Universe, from its tiniest components to its largest structures. A real turning point for digital cosmology, because until then, scientists had to make do with partial simulations, incapable of simultaneously reproducing all of the physical phenomena that form our cosmos.
Titanic computing power
Frontier is not a supercomputer like any other. Located in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Tennessee, USA), it deploys a dizzying computational architecture : more than 9,400 central processing units (CPUs) and 37,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) work together to execute a quintillion operations per second. A quintillion is a 1 followed by 18 zeros! This means that the computer can perform a billion billion mathematical operations every second.
Even if the comparison may seem irrelevant, it is interesting to imagine the power of this machine: Frontier is millions, even billions of times more powerful than a high-end PC intended for the general public.
To carry out these complex simulations, the researchers used a very specific computer code called HACC (Hardware/Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code). Fruit of 15 years of development, it has just been optimized within the framework of a $1.8 billion government projectthe Exascale Computing Project, supported by the American Department of Energy.
Dark matter, dark energy, stars: the Universe recreated in detail
Thanks to this exceptional computing power, the researchers succeeded in simulate the entire Universe. Salman Habib, director of the computational sciences division of Argonne National Laboratory explains: “ To understand the Universe, we need to model both gravity and all other physical processes, including hot gas, star formation, black holes and galaxies. “.
The simulation thus integrates the three fundamental components of the cosmos : ordinary matter, representing 5% of the Universe, dark matter (27%) whose influence is only detectable by its gravitational effects, and dark energy (68%) responsible for the accelerated expansion of the Universe. This modeling corresponds to observations from large telescopes such as the Rubin Observatory in Chile, allowing for the first time a direct confrontation between theory and observation.
Frontier’s results could notably shed light one of the greatest enigmas of modern cosmology : the nature of dark matter and its role in the formation of galactic structures. By allowing complex cosmological scenarios to be explored on time scales of several billion years, Frontier is now the perfect tool for decipher the laws that govern our Universefrom the infinitely small to the infinitely large.
- The Frontier supercomputer has modeled the complete evolution of the Universe, a first in digital cosmology.
- With 9,400 CPUs, 37,000 GPUs, and a quintillion operations per second, Frontier is a powerhouse.
- Thanks to it, scientists will be able to compare their theoretical models and live observations made by observatories.
