The potential for our understanding of the universe has taken a giant leap forward after Frontier, a supercomputer based in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), created a simulation of the universe at a scale never before achieved.
Frontier used a software platform called the Hardware/Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code (HACC) as part of ExaSky, a project that formed part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) $1.8 billion Exascale Computing Project — the largest software R&D initiative backed by the DOE.
Under Exasky, scientific applications were required to run up to 50 times faster than previous benchmarks, but Frontier and HACC quickly raced ahead of expectations — running almost 300 times faster than similar simulations of Saturn’s moon Titan. The DoE/HACC team had spent seven years since the first simulation enhancing the capabilities on exascale supercomputers like Frontier.
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