IBM Roadrunner calculating the universe’s dark matter at 1 petaflop

The inkiest and most inscrutable matter in all of the universe is dark matter. We can’t see it. We don’t even know if it’s really there: it’s an entirely hypothetic construct that, alone in the universe, emits no radiation, but whose presence is our best bet to explain a couple of phenomenon, from gravitational discrepancies of rotating large galaxies to why the universe is expanding faster than expected.

It’s true, we can’t see dark matter, but it’s pretty likely that it’s there. Unfortunately, without being able to physically detect it, we can only theorize that it exists and calculate where it might be laying. But that’s the other rub: calculating where dark matter is in the universe is a monumental task, because physicists best guess is that it account for the vast majority of the mass in the universe.

Enter IBM to the rescue, with their top of the line supercomputer, the IBM Roadrunner. It is currently churning through simulations of both dark matter and dark energy, crunching through the data and calculating where dark matter and dark energy might lie in galaxies full of trillions of stars. And it’s doing all of this at sustained speeds faster than one petraflop, or one quadrillion calculations per second. That might be fast enough to max out Crysis.

The resulting calculations might offer us the best glimpse yet into the dark matter and energy that make up our universe. But don’t bank on the results too much: IBM’s successor to the Roadrunner will be out in 2012, and be able to calculate everything 20 times faster.

Read more at HPC Wire