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David Blume
Oct 2, 2011
Joseph Lee originally shared:
Grand Simulacrum
Bolshoi is a russian word meaning great or grand, and is an accurate descriptor of the Bolshoi simulation, the most accurate cosmological simulation of the universe made to date. Researchers from the University of California High-Performance Astrocomputing Center and New Mexico Stat University have started releasing data from the simulation this month, giving us the basis for much of the current research on the structure and evolution of the universe. The original measurments came from NASA's WMAP Explorer mission, which has been mapping the light of the Big Bang in the entire sky.

"These huge cosmological simulations are essential for interpreting the results of ongoing astronomical observations and for planning the new large surveys of the universe that are expected to help determine the nature of the mysterious dark energy"

The video below shows a visualization of a fraction of that data, depicting dark matter in 1/1000 of the entire cosmological simulation. I'd check out the vimeo version in the link as well, the music makes it a great experience :)

http://hipacc.ucsc.edu/Bolshoi/

Comments

Mike Kobb on Oct 2, 2011
What is this embedded animation, out of curiosity? It uses a large quantity of CPU resource and makes the browser generally slow. I don't think it's Flash?

David Blume on Oct 3, 2011
What happens when you view source? It says tester.gif for me, so I figured GIF file. Do you have reason to believe otherwise? If the linked image didn't end with .gif, I would have appended "?x=.gif", which fools some browsers into attempting to render it according the the suggested file suffix, and you can see if it worked. (I did that sort of thing here: http://www.plurk.com/p/e74xvx.)

Mike Kobb on Oct 3, 2011
Wow. That is some unreadable source! Yeah, it seems to be a GIF. Weird. It's totally soaking up CPU. 74%!

David Blume on Oct 3, 2011
Couple of things: It's very CPU intensive for Macintoshes to render opaque black. And I promise not to reply here, bumping this item to the top of your Google+ stream, ruining your computer's responsiveness. Unless I think it's funny. :)

Mike Kobb on Oct 3, 2011
Firefox uses "only" 25% of the CPU to display the same GIF. Interesting.

Mike Kobb on Oct 3, 2011
And Chrome uses 17% while loading the GIF then between 8-14% once fully loaded, and does a much smoother job on the animation.

Mike Kobb on Oct 3, 2011
(I filed a bug with Apple)

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