High-Performance Data Analysis in Computational Cosmology

Steve Rangel
Seminar

The richness and realism attained in a modern cosmological simulation provides a wealth of information that requires sophisticated analysis techniques to extract scientific knowledge about the universe being represented. For example, highly resolved structures in a large simulation volume can provide a means to study the theoretical predictions of gravitational lensing and to investigate the astrophysical and observational systematics that could falsely mimic true scientific signals. While modern simulation codes have achieved unprecedented performance and scalability, the aforesaid is often untrue for many important analysis codes – often becoming the bottleneck in complex data processing pipelines. In this talk, we present work that addresses the scalability problems these pipelines encounter when utilizing large-volume, high-resolution N-body simulations through the development of new parallel algorithms for fundamental analyses performed on particles, where the sheer amou nt of data becomes intrinsically problematic.