Largest Replica Of Our Universe Now Available For Free Download—All 3000TB Of It
Image via ID 42956839 © Blackzheep | Dreamstime.com
A copy of the universe can now be downloaded from the cloud for free, thanks to the Center for Computational Astrophysics.
This was created by an international team of researchers hailing from Japan, Spain, Argentina, Australia, Chile, the US, France, and Italy. A supercomputer dedicated to astronomy, named ATERUI II, made up the final part of the group.
Their research was documented in this month’s issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, in which dark matter halo concentrations were investigated using the model.
Named Uchuu, meaning “outer space” in Japanese, the simulation is the largest and most realistic we have had so far, comprising 2.1 trillion particles in a computational cube measuring 9.63 billion light-years each side.
Because the simulation was so huge, even with the supercomputer’s power, it took about a year to complete. “To produce Uchuu we have used... all 40,200 processors (CPU cores) available exclusively for 48 hours each month,” explains Tomoaki Ishiyama, an associate professor at Chiba University who developed the code used to generate the system.
“20 million supercomputer hours were consumed, and 3 Petabytes of data were generated, the equivalent of 894,784,853 pictures from a 12-megapixel cell phone.”
Image via Tomoaki Ishiyama
It has been described as a “time machine” by Julia F. Ereza, a PhD student at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía in Spain who worked on the research.
“We can go forward, backward and stop in time, we can ‘zoom in’ on a single galaxy or ‘zoom out’ to visualize a whole cluster, we can see what is really happening at every instant and in every place of the universe from its earliest days to the present,” she states.
These 20 million computer hours produced more than 3,000 terabytes of data, which is a mind-boggling amount. Futurism refers to the largest consumer hard drive standing at 20 terabytes for comparison.
But no fret, the team managed to compress all the data into “just” 100 terabytes, which now feels like a tiny amount.
If you have the time and space (literally), Uchuu can be downloaded from its GitHub page. Space exploration just got a whole lot safer from the comfort of your home, albeit surrounded by at least five 20-terabyte hard drives.
[via Futurism, images via various sources]
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