Milky Way

A sub-parsec resolution simulation of the Milky Way

Check out the full version, with more info, guided tour etc...

About the simulation:

Details in Renaud F. et al. (2013)

The simulation has been running for 12 million CPU hours on 6080 cores of the Curie supercomputer hosted at the TGCC (France).

The simulation in numbers

Yes, you are probably older than the shortest timestep in the simulation!

Adaptive Mesh Refinment

In the simulation, the gas is rendered on a grid. But there is no need to have high resolution (= small cells) where there are no structures, like outside the galactic disk, or between the spiral arms. However, maximum resolution is required in the densest structures, like the star forming clouds. The Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) technique does the job of refining the grid only when and where it is needed. One level of refinement corresponds to cells smaller by a factor 2. Therefore, at level 6, cells are 26=64 times smaller than the cell at level 0 (which is the entire simulated volume).

Without AMR, the entire simulation would require 9 223 372 036 854 775 808 cells.

Using this simulation

All our data is publicly available, but no interface is provided. The amount of data, the complex structure of the AMR and the fact that I have something else to do that coding an interface make the distribution of data quite inefficient. However, I am more than happy to share the simulation with you. I can extract the data that you need upon request. Don't hesitate to ask!

Florent Renaud - last update: 11 February 2016