The aim of this project is the creation of a rich set of cosmological simulations, spanning different cosmological models to further our understanding of the make-up and history of the universe. Each cosmological simulation in the suite will be transformed into a synthetic sky that closely mimics actual observational data, allowing for a meaningful comparison with observations, including rigorous treatment of both theoretical and observational systematic errors. The project will use the simulation suite to build a set of high-accuracy prediction tools, so-called emulators. Emulators play an important role in the analysis of cosmological measurements. They allow the exploitation of the nonlinear regime of structure formation which holds important clues about the reason for the accelerated expansion of the universe.

The simulations will be carried out with the Hardware/Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code, HACC. HACC was designed to take full advantage of contemporary and future hardware architectures. For this project, researchers will run HACC on two completely different supercomputer architectures, the BG/Q Mira at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and the GPU-enhanced system at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. The final aim is to make products from the simulation campaign available to the cosmology community to extend the science reach of these unique simulations even further.