October 03, 2011
This week astrophysicists from the University of California, Santa Cruz and New Mexico State University harnessed the power of Pleiades, a top ten supercomputer housed at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California to generate the largest and most realistic simulations of the universe in its infancy.
The simulation, which is called Bolshoi (the Russian word for grand) took over four years to develop. It tracks the movement of large bodies through space, to demonstrate how dark matter surrounds galaxies and provide gravity to glue them together.
Anatoly Klypin, professor of astronomy at New Mexico State, who wrote the computer code for the simulation. Klypin noted, "These huge cosmological simulations are essential for interpreting the results of ongoing astronomical observations and for planning the new large surveys of the universe that are expected to help determine the nature of the mysterious dark energy,”
Klypin went on to discuss the size of the data sets involved—and what is possible when that information is made available to more researchers. He told IBTimes, "We've released a lot of the data so that other astrophysicists can start to use it. So far it's less than 1 percent of the actual output, because the total output is so huge, but there will be additional releases in the future," Primack said.
According to Joel Primack who heads the simulation program at UC Santa Cruz, “The simulation corroborates the accuracy of models that astronomers have built to clarify how the Big Bang theory initiated the source of subatomic particles and galaxies that inhabit our growing universe.”
This research will allow scientists to better understand how galaxies formed as well as dark matter and dark energy formation and properties.
In quieter times, sounding the bell of funding big science with big systems tends to resonate further than when ears are already burning with sour economic and national security news. For exascale's future, however, the time could be ripe to instill some sense of urgency....
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In a recent solicitation, the NSF laid out needs for furthering its scientific and engineering infrastructure with new tools to go beyond top performance, Having already delivered systems like Stampede and Blue Waters, they're turning an eye to solving data-intensive challenges. We spoke with the agency's Irene Qualters and Barry Schneider about..
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Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
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05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.