Argonne Scientists Probe the Cosmic Structure of the Dark Universe
This visualization of the Universe as it condenses around fluctuations in the density of dark and ordinary matter is a result from a collaboration between Argonne National Laboratory and the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Argonne software, called vl3, allowed the images to be streamed live from Argonne to Portland, OR, as it was processed.
This simulation follows the growth of density perturbations in both gas and dark matter components in a volume 1 billion light years on a side beginning shortly after the Big Bang and evolved to half the present age of the universe. It calculates the gravitational clumping of intergalactic gas and dark matter modeled using a computational grid of 64 billion cells and 64 billion dark matter particles. The simulation uses a computational grid of 4096^3 cells and took over 4,000,000 CPU hours to complete.
The simulation for Enzo was computed using resources at ALCF. Credits: R. Harkness, M. L. Norman, R. Wagner, SDSC; D.R. Reynolds, Southern Methodist University; M. Hereld, J.A. Insley, E.C. Olson, M.E. Papka, and V. Vishwanath, Argonne.