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Cosmic simulations that once needed supercomputers now run on a laptop
Astronomers have long relied on supercomputers to simulate the immense structure of the Universe, but a new tool called Effort.jl is changing that. By mimicking the behavior of complex cosmological models, this emulator delivers results with the same accuracy — and sometimes even finer detail — in just minutes on a standard laptop. The breakthrough combines neural networks with clever use of physical knowledge, cutting computation time dramatically while preserving reliability.
But if we wanted to describe in detail what happens when the water moves, the explosive growth of the required calculations makes it practically impossible," explains Marco Bonici, a researcher at the University of Waterloo and first author of the study. Effort.jl also uses gradients -- i.e., "how much and in which direction" predictions change if you tweak a parameter by a tiny amount -- another element that helps the emulator learn from far fewer examples, cutting compute needs and allowing it to run on smaller machines. The study "Effort.jl: a fast and differentiable emulator for the Effective Field Theory of the Large Scale Structure of the Universe" by Marco Bonici, Guido D'Amico, Julien Bel and Carmelita Carbone is available in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP).
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