World Biggest Cosmological Fluid Mechanics Simulation

KISTI with KIAS, Korea Institute for Advanced Study, and KASI, Korea Astronomy & Space Science Institute,  jointly conducted the world biggest numerical simulation, Horizon Run 5, which calculates both calculation of cosmos and creation of galaxies.

KISTI allocated 2,500 calculation nodes of NURION, its 5th supercomputer, which corresponds  7.5 petaflops, and ran the simulation for 3 months. The research team selected French fluid mechanics numerical simulation code RAMSES, and they also optimally parallelized it for the maximum efficiency.

Newly developed RAMSES makes it possible to calculate gaseous heat and loss by supernova and active galactic nucleus; evolution of contents of heavy elements such as oxygen and iron; and detailed physical evolution process of supermassive black holes.

Limitation of spatial size of virtual universe of the previously conducted world biggest cosmological fluid mechanics simulations has made it difficult to find out the correlation between growth of large spatial structures and evolution of galaxies. HR5 is a simulation with expanded scale, so it can realistically reproduce creation and evolution of galaxies based on the standard cosmological model.