The cosmic simulator

In the coming decade, the visible universe will be surveyed to unprecedented breadth, depth, and spectral coverage to explore its structures, past history, and future fate. Data volumes of many petabytes are expected. Numerical simulations of cosmic structure formation and evolution must keep pace in scale and complexity if they are to assist in the interpretation of such data, as well as to make predictions. We describe the Cosmic Simulator, a software facility under development at UCSD for performing, analyzing, and archiving cosmological simulations of unprecedented scale and physical realism. Its major components are the adaptive mesh refinement hydrodynamic cosmology simulation code ENZO, a data analysis pipeline, and a Storage Resource Broker (SRB)-managed data archive housed at SDSC. We show scientific results from the Cosmic Simulator implemented on a data grid connecting LLNL and SDSC computational resources, and discuss future plans.