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fork(2) [soylentnews.org] writes:

      ScienceDaily [sciencedaily.com] reports on a new result published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"To uncover the nature of dark energy and the origin of our 14 billion year old accelerating universe, we have to compare the results from big studies to computational models of the universe," explained Dr Andrew Pontzen, UCL Physics & Astronomy.

      "Exciting new ventures, including the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and the Javalambre Physics of the Accelerating Universe survey, are on the horizon, and we want to be ready to do the best possible job of understanding them," added joint author Dr Raul Angulo, CEFCA, Spain.

      Dr Pontzen continued: "But every computer simulation we run gives a slightly different answer. We end up needing to take an average over hundreds of simulations to get a 'gold standard' prediction. We've shown it's possible to achieve the same model accuracy by using only two carefully-constructed virtual universes, so a process that would take weeks on a superfast computer, can now be done in a day."

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