BlueTides was run on the BlueWaters super computer at NCSA with an allocation of 2.6 million node-hours.
It simulated the universe from \(z=99\) to \(z=8.0\).
Bluetides is the largest hydrodynamic simulation ever performed at such high redshift.
BlueTides by Numbers
| Number of Particles | 697 Billion (Baryon + Dark Matter) |
| Boxsize | 400 Mpc/h per side |
| Cosmology | WMAP 9 Year cosmology |
| MPI ranks | 81000 |
| OpenMP threads | 8 |
Subgrid Physics
- Star formation
- AGN feedback
- Primodial and Metal Cooling
- Fluctuating UV background
Computational Methods
- Pressure-entropy smoothed particle hydrodyanmics
- Tree and Particle Mesh N-Body gravity solver
Non-numerical Algorithms
- Pencil Fourier Transformation domains
- Distributed multi-threading BH-Tree
- Uniformly-accessible striped snapshot files
- Partition-based parallel sorting
- Friend-of-Friend clustering and object identification
Programming Environment
- Cray XE computing nodes with 16 floating units and 32 integer units
- Cray C/C++ compiler with OpenMP support