BlueTides Simulation

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