THE American Museum of Natural History in New York is known for its impressive collection of dinosaur bones and a high-tech planetarium. For astrophysicists, though, its claim to fame is as a computing powerhouse.
The fastest of the museum’s two computer clusters can carry out more than 5 trillion mathematical operations per second. This allows it to simulate aspects of the universe in unprecedented detail. Standing nearby, listening to the low hum of fans cooling the racks of processors, I can practically feel it recreating the astrophysical processes that shaped our solar system.
Harnessing supercomputers to simulate astrophysical events is…
