A computer simulation called "Illustris" has created the first realistic virtual universe - it can recreate 13 billion years of cosmic evolution in a cube 350 million light-years on a side with unprecedented resolution.


Illustris includes both normal matter and dark matter using 12 billion 3-D "pixels," or resolution elements. The team dedicated five years to developing the Illustris program. The actual calculations took 3 months of "run time," using a total of 8,000 CPUs running in parallel. If they had used an average desktop computer, the calculations would have taken more than 2,000 years to complete.





These visible-light images compare an actual photograph of the sky (left) taken with the Hubble Space Telescope to a simulated view (right) generated by the Illustris simulation. The simulation accurately reproduces the sizes, types, and colors of galaxies in the universe. Credit: NASA / Illustris Collaboration



 Published in Nature.
Source: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics