Scientists have created the largest and most detailed simulation of the universe in history. It is called Uchuu (“Universe” in Japanese – ed.) And is available for download .
With this computer model, you can see the evolution of the universe over 13 billion years, it contains 2.1 trillion particles in a space of 9.6 billion light years.
Uchuu’s granularity allows researchers to identify elements ranging from clusters of galaxies to stellar halos of individual galaxies. The main attention in the model was paid to the behavior of dark energy and dark matter – the main engine of the formation and cluster of galaxies, which is one of the main components of the expanding Universe.
It took enormous computing power and memory to create such a detailed model. The team used over 40,000 computer cores and 20 million computer hours to create their simulation, which ended up weighing more than 3 petabytes – about 3,000 TB or 3 million GB.
With the help of multilevel compression, the developers were able to reduce the volume of results to 100 terabytes. A drive of this size will be very expensive, for example, the cost of a Nimbus Exadrive solid-state drive (up to 100 terabytes) is $ 40,000, but maybe for some it is a modest price to pay for the opportunity to “put” the whole universe in their pocket.
Fortunately, you can also access Uchuu online. The researchers have posted the raw data on skiesanduniverses.org for everyone to see .