World's largest supercomputer starts work2009-10-27 11:14 by Daniela
The world's largest supercomputer, dubbed Roadrunner, has gone online, and is starting with a terribly simple little task - modelling the composition of the universe. The model is one of the largest simulations of the distribution of matter in the universe, and aims to look at galaxy-scale mass concentrations above and beyond quantities seen in state-of-the-art sky surveys. Understanding dark energy is the number one issue in explaining the universe, according to Salman Habib of Los Alamos Laboratory. "Because the universe is expanding and at the same time accelerating, either there is a huge gap in our understanding of physics, or there is a strange new form of matter that dominates the universe – 'dark energy' – making up about 70 percent of it," said Habib. "In addition, there is five times more of an unknown 'dark matter' than there is ordinary matter in the universe, and we know it's there from many different observations; most spectacularly, we've seen it bend light in pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, but its origin is also not understood." Read more -here-
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