CCA Colloquium: Evan Schneider
Title: Galaxy Simulations in the Era of Exascale
Abstract: Recent years have witnessed enormous gains in the complexity of astrophysics simulations, and the computational power of the machines that run them. Only a couple decades ago, models of galaxy formation and evolution employed calculations with a few million cells or particles -- now those numbers typically exceed billions. With the advent of modern, GPU-based machines, such as the exascale-breaking Frontier at Oak Ridge National Lab, a new opportunity arises to increase the resolution of simulations by orders-of-magnitude more... provided the software can keep up. In this talk, I will describe our work to prepare the astrophysics code Cholla to run a “grand-challenge" trillion-cell galaxy simulation on Frontier. With a domain resolution of 10,0003 cells, this simulation will be able to self-consistently capture the cycle of star formation, supernovae, and galaxy outflows on the scale of our own Milky Way galaxy. The simulation will additionally produce hundreds of terabytes of data to be compared with the increasingly detailed surveys of our Galaxy. Combining these results promises to help us answer fundamental questions about how galaxies form, grow, and evolve throughout cosmic history.
