Big Sky: HPC Peels Back Layers of Universe

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Supercomputing resources at NERSC are helping to process data from the Planck spacecraft providing new insight as to how the universe looked just a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang .

Because Planck is observing the whole sky, it is giving us a comprehensive look at how all the smaller structures of the universe are connected to the whole,” said Jim Bartlett, a U.S. Planck team member at JPL and the Universite Paris Diderot in France.

The U.S. Planck collaboration performed its data analysis for this release at NASA’s Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) and at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where the team has both a dedicated cluster and a significant allocation of time on the NERSC supercomputers.