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 a dozen scientists in the UK, Germany, Netherlands, Canada, United States 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
- Evolution and Assembly of GaLaxies and their Environments (EAGLE)
The Millennium 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
As of December 2023, the members are:
Canada: University of Victoria
Chile: University of La Serena
China: National Astronomical Observatories of China
Finland: University of Helsinki
Germany: Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics and Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam
United Kingdom: Durham University, Liverpool John Moores University, University of Manchester, University of Nottingham and University of Sussex
United States: Johns Hopkins University and UC Riverside
References
- Projects
- "The EAGLE Project".
- Schaye, Joop; Crain, Robert A; Bower, Richard G; Furlong, Michelle; Schaller, Matthieu; Theuns, Tom; Claudio Dalla Vecchia; Frenk, Carlos S; McCarthy, I. G; Helly, John C; Jenkins, Adrian; Rosas-Guevara, Y. M; White, Simon D. M; Baes, Maarten; Booth, C. M; Camps, Peter; Navarro, Julio F; Qu, Yan; Rahmati, Alireza; Sawala, Till; Thomas, Peter A; Trayford, James (2 October 2014). "The EAGLE project: Simulating the evolution and assembly of galaxies and their environments". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 446 (446): 521. arXiv:1407.7040. Bibcode:2015MNRAS.446..521S. doi:10.1093/mnras/stu2058. S2CID 17077568.
- "About". virgo.dur.ac.uk. Retrieved 10 December 2023.