Forming the First Galaxies: Blue Tides on Blue Waters

The largest high-redshift cosmological simulation of galaxy formation ever has been recently completed by a group of astrophysicists from the U.S. and the U.K. This tour-de-force simulation was performed on the Blue Waters Cray XE/XK system at NCSA and employed 648,000 CPU cores. They utilized approximately 700 billion particles (!) to represent dark matter and ordinary matter and to create virtual galaxies inside the supercomputer. The authors, who represent Carnegie Mellon University, UC Berkeley, Princeton University, and the University of Sussex, have given their simulation the moniker BlueTides.

The astrophysicists simulated galaxy formation in a “box” 2 billion light-years on a side. At redshifts of  z = 8 to 10,  which is the maximum for which we have observed real galaxies, their simulation matches the data from the Hubble Space Telescope. And yes, dark matter plays a key role – it is the main gravitational sink that pulls in ordinary matter that forms the stars, gas, and dust that are the primary visible components of galaxies. Without dark matter, our Milky Way would be much smaller, and you probably wouldn’t be here. You can learn more about the BlueTides simulation results and methodology at insidehpc.com.

  Hubble Ultra Deep Field; STScI