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 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[1]
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
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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