“The memory requirements for PRIYA simulations are so big you cannot put them on anything other than a supercomputer,” Bird said.
TACC awarded Bird a Leadership Resource Allocation on the Frontera supercomputer. Additionally, analysis computations were performed using the resources of the UC Riverside High-Performance Computer Cluster.
The PRIYA simulations on Frontera are some of the largest cosmological simulations yet made, needing over 100,000 core-hours to simulate a system of 30723 (about 29 billion) particles in a ‘box’ 120 megaparsecs on edge, or about 3.91 million light-years across. PRIYA simulations consumed over 600,000 node hours on Frontera.