High performance cosmological simulations on a grid of supercomputers

Abstract

We present results from our cosmological N-body simulation which consisted of 2048x2048x2048 particles and ran distributed across three supercomputers throughout Europe. The run, which was performed as the concluding phase of the Gravitational Billion Body Problem DEISA project, integrated a 30 Mpc box of dark matter using an optimized Tree/Particle Mesh N-body integrator. We ran the simulation up to the present day (z=0), and obtained an efficiency of about 0.93 over 2048 cores compared to a single supercomputer run. In addition, we share our experiences on using multiple supercomputers for high performance computing and provide several recommendations for future projects.