The Illustris project is an ongoing series of astrophysical run by an international collaboration of scientists.
Illustris simulation
Overview
The original
Illustris project was carried out by
Mark Vogelsberger and collaborators as the first large-scale galaxy formation application of Volker Springel's novel Arepo code.
The Illustris project included Cosmic web Cosmology simulations of the evolution of the universe, spanning initial conditions of the Big Bang, to the present day, 13.8 billion years later. Modeling, based on the most precise data and calculations currently available, are compared to actual findings of the observable universe in order to better understand the nature of the universe, including galaxy formation, dark matter and dark energy.
The simulation included many physical processes which are thought to be critical for galaxy formation. These include the formation of stars and the subsequent "feedback" due to supernova explosions, as well as the formation of super-massive black holes, their consumption of nearby gas, and their multiple modes of energetic feedback.
Images, videos, and other data visualizations for public distribution are available at official media page.
Computational aspects
The main
Illustris simulation was run on the
TGCC at CEA (France) and the
SuperMUC at the Leibniz Computing Centre (Germany).
A total of 19 million CPU hours was required, using 8,192 CPU cores.
The peak memory usage was approximately 25 TB of RAM.
A total of 136 snapshots were saved over the course of the simulation, totaling over 230 TB cumulative data volume.
A code called "Arepo" was used to run the Illustris simulations. It was written by Volker Springel, the same author as the GADGET code. The name is derived from the Sator Square. This code solves the coupled equations of gravity and hydrodynamics using a discretization of space based on a moving Voronoi diagram. It is optimized for running on large, distributed memory supercomputers using an MPI approach.
Public data release
In April, 2015 (eleven months after the first papers were published) the project team publicly released all data products from all simulations.
All original data files can be directly downloaded through the
data release webpage. This includes group catalogs of individual halos and subhalos, merger trees tracking these objects through time, full snapshot particle data at 135 distinct time points, and various supplementary data catalogs. In addition to direct data download, a web-based API allows for many common search and
data extraction tasks to be completed without needing access to the full data sets.
German postage stamp
In December 2018, the Illustris simulation was recognized by
Deutsche Post through a special series
stamp.
Illustris Spin-Off Projects
The Illustris simulation framework has been used by a wide range of spin-off projects that focus on specific scientific questions.
IllustrisTNG:
The
IllustrisTNG project, "the next generation" follow up to the original Illustris simulation, was first presented in July, 2017. A team of scientists from Germany and the U.S. led by
Prof. Volker Springel.
First, a new physical model was developed, which among other features included Magnetohydrodynamics planned three simulations, which used different volumes at different resolutions. The intermediate simulation (TNG100) was equivalent to the original Illustris simulation. Unlike Illustris, it was run on the Hazel Hen machine at the High Performance Computing Center, Stuttgart in Germany. Up to 25,000 computer cores were employed. In December 2018 the simulation data from IllustrisTNG was released publicly. The data service includes a JupyterLab interface.
Auriga:
The
Auriga project consists of high-resolution zoom simulations of Milky Way-like dark matter halos to understand the formation of our Milky Way galaxy.
Thesan:
The
Thesan project is a radiative-transfer version of IllustrisTNG to explore the epoch of reionization.
MillenniumTNG:
The
MillenniumTNG employs the IllustrisTNG galaxy formation model in a larger cosmological volume to explore the massive end of the halo mass function for detailed cosmological probe forecasts.
TNG-Cluster:
A suite of high-resolution zoom-in simulations of galaxy clusters.
Gallery
See also
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Computational fluid dynamics
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Large-scale structure of the universe
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List of cosmological computation software
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Millennium Run
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N-body simulation
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UniverseMachine
External links
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-
Press release - Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian (7 May 2014).
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- Illustris-Project (6 May 2014).
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- NASA (14 July 2014)
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- article containing a comparison table of different simulation projects
