Lumina is designed to investigate how the first stars and galaxies reionized atoms, bringing the Universe out of the period known as the Dark Ages. Researchers from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology presented the simulation’s first results on October 26.
The project modelled interactions among 432 billion elements within a cube measuring 1.63 billion light-years on each side, covering the Universe’s first two billion years. The scale allowed the team to represent large structures of matter while also tracking galaxy formation.
The resource-intensive calculations ran on Frontier, a supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. At peak use, Lumina drew slightly more than 20% of the machine’s capacity, equivalent to the computing power of 100,000 processor cores and 15,000 graphics cards.
Sources: Le Monde Sciences.