A movie of one of the many models I tested in https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.19041, to study the interplay of galaxy evolution and primordial models of magnetic fields. For a 40Mpc^3 box, the green shows the evolution of magnetic fields, the blue of gas matter, and the red of gas temperature.
ENZO simulation ran at CINECA.
@franco_vazza
Not very related, but what is the big computing situation in Italy?
During discussions with some collaborators in INAF at Brera it sounded like they barely had desktop computers and were thinking of using Amazon to do their big calculations, so I'm (in hindsight unjustifiably) surprised you have this big machine.
@tobychev really? That's surprising..for theoretical stuff there is no problem, I apply once a year for big projects to Cineca and always get it, or I can apply more often for smaller projects. The problem might be for computing for observations or statistical analysis, if your code does not scale well or you don't use the GPU, in which case indeed you cannot apply to many facilities. But it's the first time I hear about such dire take about computing here!
@tobychev still thinking about that, I can imagine the situation of research institutes being used to have in-house computing facilities large enough for local data reduction; now data size has scaled up, astro softwares not so much, computing facilities are more efficiently stored in big centralised computing centre, so older school astronomers might have a sudden "access gap" because their usual applications cannot run locally, but are not welcomed at the HPC level.
@franco_vazza
It was several years ago so I don't remember the details unfortunately.
I think we were discussing if they could take over some of our geant4 simulations because we were hitting the monthly limits of our allocation.
Maybe they didn't think they could get a smaller allocation at CINECA in that situation, and didn't have a cluster local to the institute?
@tobychev that might have well been the situation!