Ad maiora

Congratulations to Dr. Ixandra Achitouv who has passed her PhD defense this afternoon presenting her work on "Dark matter halo mass function: imprints of the statistics of the initial density field and non-linear collapse". Ixandra will soon move to Munich to start her first postdoctoral appointment in the Cosmology Group at the University Observatory of Munich.

The wonder of teaching through a rainbow

These days my head is taken by a number of research projects that requires solving very technical issues that have to do mostly with numerical computing. Finding the solutions and advance the projects require two things: deep thinking of the best way to implement numerical algorithms that represent the physics I want to investigate and coding them correctly. It is a quite painstaking exercise, which seems very far from the fun of doing physics. So, when the day is over I do really need some physics 101. Here, I found this beautiful lecture on the rainbow by an amazing professor of physics at MIT, Walter Lewin. The rainbow is a spectacular show of nature, but it will look much more spectacular after you watch this performance by Prof. Lewin.

How to Make Teaching Come Alive
Walter H. G. Lewin

EDECS-ERC "Starting Grant" latest news

The new academic year has just begun and the pieces of my ERC-Starting Grant EDECS, officially started last April, are slowly getting together. The last part of the DELL computing server that I bought for the project has been delivered this morning. Hence, soon I will be playing with some heavy numerical stuff. Moreover, a new PhD student and the first EDECS postdoc will soon join our group in Meudon. Linda Blot is going to start her PhD working with me on clustered Dark Energy models and cosmological simulations. Linda has recently received her master degree in Astrophysics and Cosmology from the University of Bologna under the supervision of Lauro Moscardini. Shankar Agarwal is going to join us early next year as EDECS postdoc. Shankar is about to defend his PhD thesis at the University of Kansas under the supervision Hume Feldman.

We are looking forward to start some exciting EDECS science project together 

DEUS Full Universe Run

The first simulation of the full observable universe has been completed by the DEUS team using 76056 cores of Curie Thin (80000 CPUs) supercomputer of the GENCI agency at TGCC center in France. The project has been selected among other grand-challenges in all domain of computational science by the PRACE call for tier-0 machines. The simulation has followed the evolution of 550 billion particles in a 21 Gpc/h simulation box for a concordance LCDM model. To realize this immense simulation the DEUS team has used at its extreme capacity Curie Thin designed by Bull. This run, which is the first out of three expected by the project, has produce 1.2 Petabytes of data, which consist of full-sky light cones (constructed without replica) from z=0 to z=30, 15 snapshots at several redshifts and a subsample of 2 Gpc/h at every coarse integration time step. A preliminary analysis has shown that at z=0 the Universe should not contain more than 6 clusters with mass larger than 10^15 solar masses.

To date, this is the largest cosmological simulations ever run.