--- title: Watch the universe emerge from the dark ages, with Lumina description: A new simulation called Lumina models the first 2 billion years of the universe, from the cosmic dark ages onward. Built by physicists from MIT, Harvard, and... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/watch-the-universe-emerge-from-the-dark-ages-with-lumina-qobdiwlou twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Watch the universe emerge from the dark ages, with Lumina | daily.dev og:description: A new simulation called Lumina models the first 2 billion years of the universe, from the cosmic dark ages onward. Built by physicists from MIT, Harvard, and... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/watch-the-universe-emerge-from-the-dark-ages-with-lumina-qobdiwlou og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/QObDIwlOu.png og:image:alt: Watch the universe emerge from the dark ages, with Lumina og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Watch the universe emerge from the dark ages, with Lumina **[MIT News](https://daily.dev/sources/mit)** · 7 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A new simulation called Lumina models the first 2 billion years of the universe, from the cosmic dark ages onward. Built by physicists from MIT, Harvard, and other institutions, it spans 500 megaparsecs (about 1.6 billion light-years) and resolves half a trillion individual elements, including dark matter particles and gas cells, about 30 times finer than its predecessor IllustrisTNG. It is the first simulation to capture both hydrogen and helium re-ionization, showing hydrogen re-ionization was likely driven by light from early stars and galaxies while helium re-ionization was fueled by accreting supermassive black holes. The team ran it on the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge, using over 100,000 CPU cores and about 15,000 GPUs at peak scale. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What supercomputer was used to run the Lumina cosmological simulation? Lumina was run on Frontier, one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. At peak scale, the calculation used the equivalent of more than 100,000 CPU cores and around 15,000 GPUs to evolve trillions of interacting pieces of information across the simulation. _Developers curious about extreme-scale HPC workloads can follow supercomputing breakthroughs like this on daily.dev._ ### What makes the Lumina simulation different from earlier simulations like IllustrisTNG? Lumina resolves half a trillion individual elements, about 30 times higher resolution than IllustrisTNG, across a volume of 500 megaparsecs, which is 100 times larger than previous best simulations. It is also the first simulation to capture both hydrogen and helium re-ionization together, built by refining IllustrisTNG's code and adding a radiation transport model. _Anyone tracking advances in large-scale simulation engineering can follow stories like this on daily.dev._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Thermodynamic Computing Slashes AI Image Energy Use](https://daily.dev/posts/thermodynamic-computing-slashes-ai-image-energy-use-phikdpyia) · IEEE Spectrum · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [MIT astronomers discover the earliest known flickering quasar](https://daily.dev/posts/mit-astronomers-discover-the-earliest-known-flickering-quasar-5mbsafstd) · MIT News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Making Sense of the Early Universe](https://daily.dev/posts/making-sense-of-the-early-universe-5hf6muhe8) · NVIDIA · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Nasa launches telescope that will map two billion galaxies](https://daily.dev/posts/nasa-launches-telescope-that-will-map-two-billion-galaxies-nb02mkmoc) · TechCentral · 1 upvotes · 1 comments - [Rubin Observatory's first LSST Camera release: 500k galaxies in the COSMOS field](https://daily.dev/posts/rubin-observatory-s-first-lsst-camera-release-500k-galaxies-in-the-cosmos-field-vhwavwq6u) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#gpu](https://daily.dev/tags/gpu), [#astrophysics](https://daily.dev/tags/astrophysics) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/watch-the-universe-emerge-from-the-dark-ages-with-lumina-qobdiwlou) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Watch the universe emerge from the dark ages, with Lumina","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/watch-the-universe-emerge-from-the-dark-ages-with-lumina-qobdiwlou","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/watch-the-universe-emerge-from-the-dark-ages-with-lumina-qobdiwlou"},"datePublished":"2026-10-26T04:05:05.679Z","dateModified":"2026-10-26T04:15:53.140Z","description":"A new simulation called Lumina models the first 2 billion years of the universe, from the cosmic dark ages onward. 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