Virgo Consortium

The Virgo Consortium was founded in 1994 for Cosmological Supercomputer Simulations in response to the UK's High Performance Computing Initiative. Virgo developed rapidly into an international collaboration between dozen scientists in the UK, Germany, Netherlands, Canada, USA and Japan

Nodes

The largest nodes are the Institute for Computational Cosmology in the UK and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany. Other nodes exist in the UK, Netherlands, Canada, USA and Japan.

Science Goals

The science goals are to carry out state-of-the-art cosmological simulations with research areas in:

The large-scale distribution of dark matter
The formation of dark matter halos
The formation and evolution of galaxies and clusters
The physics of the intergalactic medium
The properties of the intracluster gas

Projects

The Millennium Simulation
Galaxy Simulations
First Objects
Dark Matter Halos
Intergalactic Medium
Semi-Analytical Galaxy Formation
Hubble Volume
Mock Catalogues
GIF Project[1]

The Millennium Simulation

Millenium Simulation

This N-body simulation used more than 10 billion particles to trace the evolution of the matter distribution in a cubic region of the Universe over 2 billion light-years on a side. The first results that were published in 2005 in an issue of Nature, shows how comparing such simulated data to large observational surveys can improve the understanding of the physical processes underlying the buildup of real galaxies and black holes.

Member Countries & Institutes

United Kingdom: University of Cambridge, University of Durham, University of Edinburgh, University of Nottingham and the University of Sussex
Germany: Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics
Netherlands: Leiden University
Canada: McMaster University and Queen's University
United States: Carnegie Mellon University
Japan

References

^ Projects