Magneticum Pathfinder: Precision Simulation of the Evolution of the Universe

Astrophysicists have marked the Big Bang as the beginning of time, matter, and space for some time now. Occurring about 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang brought along with it billions of galaxies, planets, black holes, and the like. But one question has plagued these astrophysicists - how did these structures come to be within the universe's original conditions?

In order to find an answer, they use cosmological simulations, which take what they know about the physical processes that shape the universe, and transform them into mathematical models. These models, which cover billions of years of universe evolution, are carried out on high-performance computers, according to a news release. 

A team of theoretical astrophysicists from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) recently performed a new and unique hydrodynamic simulation on the large-scale distribution of visible matter in the universe, as part of the Magneticum Pathfinder project. They took into account three of the most important "cosmic ingredients" in their most recent results - dark energy, dark matter, and visible matter.

Led by Klaus Dolag, the team took three physical processes of the visible universe into consideration while completing their calculations for the simulation. They examined the condensation of matter into stars, the evolution of those stars when their surrounding matter is heated by supernovae and stellar winds, and finally, the feedback from supermassive black holes that eject incredible amounts of energy into the universe. 

The team's most in-depth simulation (which had never been done in a simulation before) covered the spatial area of a cube with a box size of 12.5 billion light years, according to the news release. Normally, this tremendously large section of the universe was divided into 180 billion resolution elements containing 500 bytes of information, a number found to be unattainable by any previous simulation.

"Astronomical surveys from space telescopes like Planck or Hubble observe a large segment of the visible universe while sophisticated simulations so far could only model very small parts of the universe, making a direct comparison virtually impossible," Dolag said. "Thus, Magneticum Pathfinder marks the beginning of a new era in computer-based cosmology."

Dolag's team's achievement did not come easily, though, as it took a decade of research and development with experts from the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. Then, the simulation itself took about two full years to be realized. 

"One of the biggest challenge for such a complex problem is to find the right balance between optimizing the simulation code and the development of the astrophysical modelling," Dolag said. "While the code permanently needs to be adjusted to changing technologies and new hardware, the underlying models need to be improved by including better or additional descriptions of the physical processes which form our visible universe." 

The simulation utilized the LRZ's highest-performance supercomputer, SuperMUC, taking up all 86,016 computing cores and 155 of the 194 terabytes available for memory. The entirety of the simulation required 25 million CPU hours, and generated 320 terabytes of data, which is now available for scientific use worldwide. This has the potential to open up a whole new avenue of research into the history of the universe and space time.

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