World’s fastest supercomputer models the unseen universe

What the universe looks like? Sure, it’s hard to tell especially since it takes billions of years for the light from most of it to reach us. Even to visualize the 70% of the matter in the universe that’s invisible is even more difficult.

That’s why scientists bring out IBM Roadrunner, the heavy iron, the world’s fastest supercomputer, to simulate crazy stuff like dark energy and dark matter for us. Through data simulating galaxies, it’s crunching full of trillions of stars at a sustained speed of faster than one petaflop, or 1 quadrillion calculations per second.

According to scientists, the remarkable of Roadrunner power pushes computational throughput beyond anything ever used before by three orders of magnitude working on the Roadrunner Universe Model. The result is the best look we’ve ever had at the origins of the mysterious unseen universe. The images will get better, there’s a 20-petaflop computer coming in 2012.

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