Simulating the Universe

Science - Pete Wilton | 27 Sep 10. How do you accurately simulate the Universe on a computer? A new programme at the Oxford Martin School , led by Pedro Ferreira of Oxford University's Department of Physics, aims to see how this and other seemingly impossible tasks can be tackled by developing new ways of handling data. Pedro will be explaining this new approach as part of a showcase at the Royal Society this evening, but before that I caught up with him to ask about data, supercomputers and the biggest problems in science: OxSciBlog: Why do we need new approaches to handling data? - Pedro Ferreira: We are at a threshold of a new era in Cosmology. Over the past few years we have developed very powerful instruments - groundbased, balloon born and satellite telescopes - that have a phenomenal capacity for collecting data. New surveys of galaxies, maps of cosmic radiation at various different frequencies all probe the Universe on a wide range of scales. We want to learn what are the fundamental properties of the Universe, such as what its made of and how it is evolving. The new data sets are so massive that this can't be done using conventional methods. We need to be clever, innovative, pushing the boundaries of data management and statistical analysis. In particular we need to come up with radically different methods. Otherwise we won't be able to extract the knowledge we want from the data we have in hand. And it is going to get much, much worse. OSB: What lessons have been learnt from astrophysics & cosmology about processing/searching large amounts of data?