Cosmological Simulations in Exascale Era
This work addresses the problem of making astrophysical applications compatible with future exascale hardware for researchers in cosmology, but it is incremental as it builds on existing simulation methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of adapting cosmological simulations for exascale computing systems, focusing on designing and validating a prototype using ARM64 cores and FPGA accelerators to enable large-scale, high-resolution simulations of cosmic structure formation.
The architecture of Exascale computing facilities, which involves millions of heterogeneous processing units, will deeply impact on scientific applications. Future astrophysical HPC applications must be designed to make such computing systems exploitable. The ExaNeSt H2020 EU-funded project aims to design and develop an exascale ready prototype based on low-energy-consumption ARM64 cores and FPGA accelerators. We participate to the design of the platform and to the validation of the prototype with cosmological N-body and hydrodynamical codes suited to perform large-scale, high-resolution numerical simulations of cosmic structures formation and evolution. We discuss our activities on astrophysical applications to take advantage of the underlying architecture.