Universe

Timeline of the Universe before the advent of planet Earth

Main article: Timeline of the Universe before the advent of planet Earth

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2024: Equipped with 36 thousand video cards, the supercomputer has created the largest model of the Universe in history

At the end of November 2024, researchers from the Argonne National Laboratory power engineering specialists USA of the Ministry announced the creation of the largest model of the universe in history. The project, called ExaSky, is expected to help scientists better understand the evolution and physics of the universe and study the nature of dark matter.

The work was done using the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This computer complex has a capacity of 1.353 Eflops, and the peak speed reaches 2.055 Eflops. About 9,000 Frontier compute nodes were involved, each equipped with four AMD Instinct MI250X graphics accelerators. Thus, a total of 36 thousand video cards were used for modeling. The Frontier system, created by HPE, as of the end of November 2024, ranks second in the ranking of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, the Tor-500.

When modeling the Universe, HACC (Hardware/Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code) was used - a supercomputer framework created specifically for high-performance computing systems. In 2012 and 2013, HACC was a finalist for the prestigious Gordon Bell Award for Computing. Later, the HACC framework was improved as part of the ExaSky project. The scale of the simulation amounted to over 31 billion cubic megaparsecs.

One of the results obtained is the visualization of a space volume of 64 × 64 × 76 megaparsecs, or 311,296 cubic megaparsecs. This size is only 0.001% of the total simulation volume. The images show the structure of galaxies. Red areas show zones with hot gas, the temperature of which reaches 100 million Kelvin or more.^[1]

2022: The largest snapshot of the universe is obtained. Photo

On June 6, 2022, an international team of scientists released the largest near-infrared image ever taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, allowing astronomers to map the star-forming regions of the universe and learn how the earliest and farthest galaxies were born. Read more here.

Muons

Main article: Muons

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