Cosmological neutrino simulations at extreme scale. (August 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Emberson, J. D.; Yu, Hao-Ran; Inman, Derek; Zhang, Tong-Jie; Pen, Ue-Li; Harnois-Déraps, Joachim; Yuan, Shuo; Teng, Huan-Yu; Zhu, Hong-Ming; Chen, Xuelei; Xing, Zhi-Zhong
• Is Part Of: Research in astronomy and astrophysics. Volume 17:Number 8(2017:Aug.)
• Publication Date: 2017-08
• Subjects: cosmology: theory -- large-scale structure of universe -- methods: numerical; Astronomy -- Periodicals; Astrophysics -- Periodicals; 520.5
• DOI: 10.1088/1674-4527/17/8/85
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1674-4527

Abstract

Abstract: Constraining neutrino mass remains an elusive challenge in modern physics. Precision measurements are expected from several upcoming cosmological probes of large-scale structure. Achieving this goal relies on an equal level of precision from theoretical predictions of neutrino clustering. Numerical simulations of the non-linear evolution of cold dark matter and neutrinos play a pivotal role in this process. We incorporate neutrinos into the cosmological N-body code CUBEP 3 M and discuss the challenges associated with pushing to the extreme scales demanded by the neutrino problem. We highlight code optimizations made to exploit modern high performance computing architectures and present a novel method of data compression that reduces the phase-space particle footprint from 24 bytes in single precision to roughly 9 bytes. We scale the neutrino problem to the Tianhe-2 supercomputer and provide details of our production run, named TianNu, which uses 86% of the machine (13 824 compute nodes). With a total of 2.97 trillion particles, TianNu is currently the world's largest cosmological N-body simulation and improves upon previous neutrino simulations by two orders of magnitude in scale. We finish with a discussion of the unanticipated computational challenges that were encountered during the TianNu runtime.