If you’re someone who’s fascinated by the cosmos and want to experience it from the comfort of your home, this might be good news for you. An international team of researchers has developed the largest and most realistic virtual universe till now. Dubbed Uchuu, which means “outer space” in Japanese, simulates 2.1 trillion particles in a computational cube, making it 9.63 billion light-years wide on each side.
The simulation was developed with the aid of the supercomputer ATERUI II, which is developed specifically for astronomy projects. The supercomputer located in Iwate, Japan, has a peak performance of over 3 Pflops. However, even this much power took one year to crunch through all the data and produce a simulation.
Useful for studying distant objects
“To produce Uchuu we have used … all 40,200 processors (CPU cores) available exclusively for 48 hours each month,” said Tomoaki Ishiyama, who code developer for the project. “Twenty million supercomputer hours were consumed, and 3 Petabytes of data were generated, the equivalent of 894,784,853 pictures from a 12-megapixel cell phone.”
The simulations show halos of dark matter which are massive structures that can unfurl mysteries of the formation of galaxies and the early universe. The large-scale nature of the simulation makes it very useful for researching how the universe evolved with time, as it shows very distant regions which represent the early stages of the universe’s life.
Experience the cosmos for free
“Uchuu is like a time machine,” said Julia F. Ereza, a Ph.D. student who uses Uchuu. “We can go forward, backward and stop in time, we can ‘zoom in’ on a single galaxy or ‘zoom out’ to visualize a whole cluster, we can see what is really happening at every instant and in every place of the Universe from its earliest days to the present, being an essential tool to study the Cosmos.”
Besides, the team has also made the entire simulation available for a free download if you want to experience it. However, you’ll need huge data storage for that, as it would eat up around 100 terabytes of storage.
