A group of French researchers has carried out the first computer simulation of the structure of the entire observable universe, from the Big Bang to the present day. These simulations allow us to see how no less than 550,000 million particles have evolved.
The simulation constitutes the first of the three phases of a project called DEUS (acronym for “Dark Energy Universe Simulation”), which is being carried out by means of a new supercomputer called CURIE, which is housed in the Gran Calculation Center (TGCC) of the CEA (Commissariat of Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies). The CURIE supercomputer can perform trillions of operations per second.
For the moment, the simulation work of the standard cosmological model has already made it possible to encrypt the total of galactic groupings with a mass greater than 100,000 million solar masses: they add up to 144 million. Researchers have also discovered that the first such galactic cluster formed when the universe was “only” 2 billion years old.
The next two stages of the simulation will focus on the cosmological evolution of models with dark energy, the enigmatic component introduced to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe. The researchers intend to go one step further to discover what kind of imprint dark energy leaves on cosmic structure and how the nature of dark energy can be inferred by observing the distribution of matter in the universe.
In total, the DEUS project will use more than 30 million hours (about 3,500 years) of computing on CURIE’s central processing units. Between all the computational calculations, more than 150 petabytes of data are generated, the equivalent of 30 million DVDs.
