The University of Chicago Research Funding

• Principal Investigator: Andrey Kravtsov, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and the College; Senior Fellow, Computation Institute; Enrico Fermi Institute; Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
• Start Date: September 15, 2009
• Total Award Amount: $475,523

Project Description

This award supports a research program to develop petascale numerical simulations of structure formation in the universe. This work will utilize the Adaptive Refinement Tree (ART) cosmological simulation code. Specific goals are: (1) to achieve petascale level performance for the ART cosmological code by improving load balancing, communication performance, and the hybrid parallelization mode on multi-core/multi-processor nodes on petascale platforms; (2) to develop a robust fault-tolerance mechanism for petascale ART simulations; (3) to provide a user-level interface and documentation for public release of ART under an open source license; and (4) to produce state-of-the-art cosmological simulations that will result in a rich scientific output and a valuable repository of simulation results for the astrophysical community. The project combines the expertise of a computer scientist with extensive experience in research on load balancing, scalability, and fault tolerance, with a group of numerical cosmologists with significant experience in code development and running state-of-the-art cosmological simulations. The petascale cosmological simulations resulting from this work will lead to major breakthroughs in our understanding of galaxy formation and will provide critical theoretical support for forthcoming large observational surveys designed to probe the matter and energy content of our universe and constrain properties of the mysterious dark matter and dark energy.

This project will bridge the cross-disciplinary boundaries between Computer Science and Astrophysics by developing a tightly-knit team collaborating on a single project. By involving graduate students of different levels and a postdoctoral scholar, this project will serve as an excellent vehicle for professional training of young computational scientists and numerical astrophysicists in cutting edge simulation techniques. The ultimate result of this project - a publicly available, open source petascale cosmological simulation code - will be of great value for the general astrophysics community, and will be widely used, as shown by the widespread usage of other, currently existing, publicly available cosmological codes. The code can also be used as a calibration tool for current and pending dark energy experiments. On a broader scale, this project will have a direct impact on undergraduate education and the general public. Visualizations of cosmological simulations of the kind proposed here trigger a curiosity and a sense of discovery in the general public afforded only by the exploration of the universe. To this end, in collaboration with the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, three-dimensional visualizations of the simulations will be developed for full-dome planetaria shows and public lectures and be made available on the web.

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, NSF Award number: 0904482