Supercomputing and the Search for Planet 9

Still unobserved, Planet 9 is within the gravitational influence of our sun, completing one revolution in approximately 20,000 years. That means its orbital clock runs so slowly that it has not been around the sun since our last ice age. “The work could not have been completed without the heavy lifting provide by supercomputers at California Institute of Technology (Caltech). There, Batygin employed the Fram supercomputer at CITerra for four months to simulate four billion years of solar system evolution. Fram consists of almost 4,000 cores, running on the NSF-funded Rocks software environment, with 512TB of Lustre file storage.”