Unlocking the Mysteries of the Universe with Supercomputers
Katrin Heitmann · 2016
Summary form only given. Cosmology is in a scientifically very exciting phase. Two decades of surveying the sky have culminated in the celebrated "Cosmological Standard Model". Yet, two of its key pillars, dark matter and dark energy -- together accounting for 95% of the mass-energy of the Universe -- remain mysterious. Deep fundamental questions demand answers, to address these burning questions, survey capabilities are being exponentially improved. The new observations will pose tremendous challenges on many fronts -- from the sheer size of the data that will be collected to its modeling and interpretation. The interpretation of the data requires sophisticated simulations on the world's largest supercomputers. In this talk I will introduce HACC, the Hardware/Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code, which is being developed to combat the tremendous computational challenge to simulate our Universe. HACC is a new and evolving cosmology N-body code framework, designed to run very efficiently on diverse computing architectures and to scale to millions of cores and beyond. HACC can run on all current supercomputer architectures and supports a variety of programming models. HACC's design allows for ease of portability, and at the same time, high levels of sustained performance on the fastest supercomputers available today. I present a description of the design philosophy of HACC and underlying code structure and outline some implementation details. I will also briefly describe the analysis challenges posed by the large data sets that the HACC simulations generate. Finally, I will discuss some results from our recent work on confronting the simulated with the real Universe.