Collaborative Research: Toward Petascale Simulations of Early Cosmic Evolution

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AST-0708960/0707505/0708309Norman/Ostriker/RicottiThis is a three-award collaborative project, led by Dr Norman, to harness the power of future petascale supercomputers for self-consistent simulations of early structure formation in cosmologically representative volumes. Astronomers' expectation of what will be observed at high redshifts (above 7) by future major facilities is largely based on theoretical and numerical models of the early growth of cosmic structure in a standard Lambda-CDM cosmological framework. The new simulations will span local and global scales using adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) technology developed specifically for petascale computers. This enables simulations with ten billion particles, a spatial dynamic range of a hundred thousand, and complex baryonic physics including radiative and chemical feedback. As theories are at present poorly constrained by observations, an equally important effort will be a rigorous attempt at uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis. The study will thus address forefront questions in cosmology using the most complete physical models running on the most powerful computers, analyzed using best practices. The result will be comprehensive models of early cosmic evolution along with a rigorous assessment of their predictive value.This work will substantially advance the state-of-the-art in numerical multi-physics cosmological simulations, which can be expected to continue previous successful impacts of code availability, both within and outside of the astrophysics community. The new petascale methodologies will also be publicized well outside the usual astronomy circles, and the enhanced version of the Enzo community code will be released to the public. In addition, both the numerical results and the synthetic observations will be published to the international research community using mechanisms provided by the National Virtual Observatory.