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Inside The Discovery Cloud: Katrin Heitmann

By Rob Mitchum // March 21, 2014

This year, the Computation Institute is launching a new series of talks from CI researchers called Inside The Discovery Cloud. The CI’s vision of The Discovery Cloud seeks to make the most powerful computational resources available to research of all scales and disciplines, accelerating the discovery of tomorrow’s critical breakthroughs and innovations. In this series, CI researchers will discuss work on topics ranging from the future of cities to climate change to genomics, using technology from the world’s fastest supercomputers to the common laptop.

The second half of our Particles to Cosmos-themed Inside The Discovery Cloud event on March 20th increased the scale dramatically from viruses to the entire known universe. Katrin Heitmann, an astrophysicist and CI Senior Fellow at Argonne, studies the expansion of the universe, running the largest cosmological simulations ever performed. The results of the models — which track the movement of over 1 trillion “tracer” particles — provide important references for astronomers using advanced telescopes to search the sky for evidence of elusive dark energy and dark matter.

In the video below, Heitmann talks about developing the Hardware/Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code (HACC) framework with collaborator and CI senior fellow Salman Habib, and how they ran the code on some of the world’s fastest supercomputers, including Argonne’s 10-petaflops Mira supercomputer. For more on Heitmann and Habib’s work, view this article on the Argonne website or view this excellent video.