超级计算机模型,见过宇宙的演化吗？超级计算机给出了新模型

A representation of the evolution

of the universe over 13.7 billion years. The far left depicts the

earliest moment we can now probe, when a period of "inflation"

produced a burst of exponential growth in the universe. (Size is

depicted by the vertical extent of the grid in this graphic.) For

the next several billion years, the expansion of the universe

gradually slowed down as the matter in the universe pulled on

itself via gravity. More recently, the expansion has begun to speed

up again as the repulsive effects of dark energy have come to

dominate the expansion of the universe. The afterglow light seen by

WMAP was emitted about 380,000 years after inflation and has

traversed the universe largely unimpeded since then. The conditions

of earlier times are imprinted on this light; it also forms a

backlight for later developments of the universe. (Credit: NASA /

WMAP Science Team)

New Mathematical Model Aids

Big Bang Supercomputer Research

ScienceDaily (Jan. 6, 2010) — Scientists

have made many discoveries about the origins of our 13

billion-year-old universe. But many scientific mysteries remain.

What exactly happened during the Big Bang, when rapidly evolving

physical processes set the stage for gases to form stars, planets

and galaxies? Now astrophysicists using supercomputers to simulate

the Big Bang have a new mathematical tool to unravel those

mysteries, says Daniel R. Reynolds, assistant professor of

mathematics at SMU.

Reynolds collaborated with astrophysicists at the University of

California at San Diego as part of a National Science Foundation

project to simulate cosmic reionization, the time from 380,000

years to 400 million years after the universe was born.

Together the scientists built a computer model of events during

the "Dark Ages" when the first stars emitted radiation that altered

the surrounding matter, enabling light to pass through. The team

tested its model on two of the largest existing NSF supercomputers,

"Ranger" at the University of Texas at Austin and "Kraken" at the

University of Tennessee.

The new mathematical model tightly couples a myriad of physical

processes present during cosmic reionization, such as gas motion,

radiation transport, chemical kinetics and gravitational

acceleration due to star clustering and dark matter dynamics,

Reynolds says.

The key characteristic of the model that differentiates it from

competing work is that the researchers focused on enforcing a very

tight coupling in the model between the different physical

processes.

"By forcing the computational methods to tightly bind these

processes together, our new model allows us to generate simulations

that are highly accurate, numerically stable and computationally

scalable to the largest supercomputers available," Reynolds

says.

They presented their research at a Texas Cosmology Network

Meeting at UT in late October. Reynolds' mathematical research also

was published as "Self-Consistent Solution of Cosmological

Radiation-Hydrodynamics and Chemical Ionization" in the October

issue of the "Journal of Computational Physics."

Simulation models typically consist of a complex bundle of

mathematical equations representing physical processes. The

equations are integrated to reflect interaction of the physical

processes. Only supercomputers can simultaneously solve the

equations. Scientific intuition and creativity come into play by

developing the base model with equations with the best parameters,

Reynolds says. Variables can be altered to describe different

scenarios that might have occurred. The objective is to develop a

simulation model with results that most closely resemble telescope

observations and that predict a universe that looks like what we

have. If that happens, scientists have discovered the set of

physical processes that existed at the birth of the universe as it

was evolving from one instant to the next.

Physical processes include the heating of various gases,

gravity, the conservation of mass, the conservation of momentum,

the conservation of energy, expansion of the universe, the

transport of radiation, and the chemical ionization of different

species such as Hydrogen and Helium, the primary elements present

at the beginning of the universe. An additional equation running in

the background describes and models the dynamics of dark matter --

the majority of the matter in the universe -- which gives rise to

gravity and is attributed with helping the universe form stars,

planets and galaxies.

"Supercomputers are so big, they hold so much data, you can

build models that work with many processes at one time," Reynolds

says. "A lot of these processes behave nonlinearly. When they are

put together, they inhibit each other, feed off each other, so you

end up with many different processes when they are put

together."

A direct consequence of the tight coupling that the researchers

enforce in their model is that the resulting system of equations is

much more complex than those that must be solved by other models,

Reynolds says.

"This paper describes both how we form the coupled model, as

well as the mathematical methods that enable us to solve the

systems of equations that result. These include methods that

accurately track the different time scales of each process, which

often occur at rates that vary by orders of magnitude," he says.

"However, perhaps the most important contribution of this paper is

our description of how we pose the complex interaction of different

models as a nonlinear problem with potentially billions of

equations and unknowns, and solve that problem using new algorithms

designed for next-generation supercomputers. We conclude by

demonstrating that the new model lives up to the ideal, providing

an approach that allows high accuracy, stability and scalability on

a suite of difficult test problems."

Only recently have mathematics algorithms been invented to solve

basic problems -- like diffusion of heat -- using resources as

large as those available on modern supercomputers, Reynolds says.

There have been simple analytical solutions to many problems from

mathematical physics for hundreds of years. However, those

analytical solutions only work when scientists simplify the problem

in some way or another. For example, he says, they may approximate

the shape of a planet as a sphere, instead of an ellipsoid, or may

assume that ocean water is incompressible, which only works for

very shallow water, or assume the Earth is homogeneous, instead of

formed using widely differing layers of rock.

"Scientists have been able to approximate a great many physical

processes in such idealized situations. But the true frontier

nowadays is to let go of these simplifying approximations and treat

the problems as they really are, by modeling all of the geometric

structure and the in-homogeneity," Reynolds says. "To do that, you

need to solve harder equations with lots of data, which is ideally

suited to using supercomputers. The numerical methods that can

allow us to use larger and larger computers have only just come

out. The problems are getting more challenging and harder to solve,

but the numerical methods are reaching greater capability, so you

can really start moving them forward. These new computers make

everything a new frontier."

Besides Reynolds, other researchers were John C. Hayes, Lawrence

Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif.; Pascal Paschos,

Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences, University of

California at San Diego, La Jolla, Calif.; and Michael L. Norman,

Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences, and physics department,

the University of California at San Diego, La Jolla.