“The potential for our understanding of the universe has taken a giant leap forward after Frontier, a supercomputer based in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), created a simulation of the universe at a scale never before achieved.

Frontier used a software platform called the Hardware/Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code (HACC) as part of ExaSky, a project that formed part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) $1.8 billion Exascale Computing Project — the largest software R&D initiative backed by the DOE.

Under Exasky, scientific applications were required to run up to 50 times faster than previous benchmarks, but Frontier and HACC quickly raced ahead of expectations — running almost 300 times faster than similar simulations of Saturn’s moon Titan. The DoE/HACC team had spent seven years since the first simulation enhancing the capabilities on exascale supercomputers like Frontier.

This allowed for hydrodynamic cosmology simulations, a far more computationally intensive computer model that incorporates principles like the expansion of the universe and the influence of dark matter. Previous models only incorporated measures of gravity, gas or plasma.”

From Live Science.