Cosmological Simulations in Exascale Era

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development and validation of an exascale-ready platform using ARM64 cores and FPGAs, optimized for large-scale cosmological simulations of cosmic structure formation.

Contribution

It presents the design and validation of an exascale computing prototype tailored for astrophysical N-body and hydrodynamical simulations.

Findings

Successful validation of cosmological simulation codes on the prototype

Demonstrated efficiency of ARM64 and FPGA architecture for large-scale simulations

Insights into optimizing astrophysical applications for exascale systems

Abstract

The architecture of Exascale computing facilities, which involves millions of heterogeneous processing units, will deeply impact on scientific applications. Future astrophysical HPC applications must be designed to make such computing systems exploitable. The ExaNeSt H2020 EU-funded project aims to design and develop an exascale ready prototype based on low-energy-consumption ARM64 cores and FPGA accelerators. We participate to the design of the platform and to the validation of the prototype with cosmological N-body and hydrodynamical codes suited to perform large-scale, high-resolution numerical simulations of cosmic structures formation and evolution. We discuss our activities on astrophysical applications to take advantage of the underlying architecture.