Session

DescriptionCosmology has undergone a revolution, from a rather philosophical enterprise to a data-driven, observational science. To make sense of the terabytes and petabytes of data streaming in from the new and future facilities we need large-scale N-body simulations that contain the relevant physics and cover a huge dynamical range to reach the required precision, in the future they will provide a benchmark problem for exascale computing. These simulations combine many numerical challenges, including load-balancing multi-scale dynamical evolution, solving nonlinear finite-difference equations, managing complex data sets and performing on-the-fly statistical analyses. This minisymposium reviews the methods behind the largest current simulations that evolve over a trillion particles, and ongoing developments in including effects from General Relativity as well as relativistic fields and particles in the simulations. The presentations will provide both an overview of current results relevant for cosmology and a look inside the machinery (algorithms and their implementations) behind the latest generation of cosmological simulation codes.