One of the major questions we'd really like
to understand is what is dark matter, this
mass that is the dominant form of mater in
the universe but is hard to detect on Earth.
So one of the ways we can actually study that
is to use computer simulations through XSEDE
to look at how dark matter should clump around
galaxies like the Milky Way and how it should
form around smaller galaxies as well.
So that's one of the main goals of our research.
It's possible to do very approximate work
with pencil and paper but when you really
want to get the details right snd understand
what predictions of the theory are, and how
structures should form in the universe, it's
a very multiscale process with a lot of different
processes going on, so we need to be able
to simulate these processes together because
otherwise if you don't get one, you don't
get the entire thing right at the end.
Well most of my collaborators use XSEDE resources.
They can all access the same data in the same
central repository with the same tools, so
everybody knows exactly what they're getting
and can get it whenever is necessary.
When we try to simulate the universe or understand
the evolution of structure in the universe
we need to do a lot of repeated calculations
and so the supercomputing aspect of that,
highly parallel supercomputing, is our bread
and butter really.
We produce extremely large datasets, terabytes
upon terabytes.
We often can look at say the dark matter by
itself and then separate out gas and stars
and try to see whether they behave the same
way or whether they show different features.
We can even split things up based on properties
of the gas, so maybe hot gas behaves very
differently from cold gas where stars form.
And that visual impression really gives us
something important and feeds back into our
research in an important way.
Since we don't actually detect dark matter
directly on Earth yet but only see it through
its gravitational influences we have to rely
on astrophysical observations and the theory
is done through computer simulations which
wouldn't be possible without resources like
XSEDE provides.
