Using Exascale Computing to Explain the Delicate Balance of Nuclear Forces in the Universe

TL;DR

This paper presents a new high-performance computing approach to simulate nucleon interactions, revealing the delicate balance of nuclear forces that shape the universe, enabled by exascale supercomputers.

Contribution

Developed a novel physics simulation code optimized for exascale architectures, achieving unprecedented speed-up in modeling nuclear interactions.

Findings

Achieved a maximum speed-up of approximately 240 times over previous methods.

Demonstrated excellent weak and linear scaling on multiple exascale supercomputers.

Enabled detailed exploration of the sensitivity of nuclear forces to fundamental parameters.

Abstract

The vast majority of visible matter in our universe comes from protons and neutrons (the nucleons). Nucleon interactions are fundamental to how the universe developed after the Big Bang and govern all nuclear phenomena. The subtle balance in how two nucleons interact shapes the universe's hydrogen content that is central to our existence. Our objective is to compute the interaction strength while varying the parameters of nature to understand how delicate this balance is. We developed a new code using sophisticated physics algorithms and a highly optimized library for simulations on CPU-GPU parallel architectures. It has excellent weak scaling and impressive linear scaling for a fixed problem size with increasing number of nodes up to El Capitan's full $\sim$11,000 nodes. On Alps, El Capitan, Frontier, Jupiter, and Perlmutter supercomputers we achieve a maximum disruptive speed-up of $\sim$240 times the previous state-of-the-art, signaling a new era of supercomputing.