First Galaxies and Quasars in the BlueTides Simulation -- Yu Feng

We will report the recent progress on the BlueTides simulation. BlueTides is a hydrodynamical cosmology simulation that utilizes the full capability of the Blue Waters supercomputer at NCSA. The simulation combines state of art physical models and advanced parallel algorithms to make the first numerical predictions for the entire population of galaxies and supermassive black holes (and the intergalactic medium) that existed when the Universe was less than a billion years old. This talk consists of four parts: 1) I will review the important technical aspects of the simulation code MP-Gadget; 2) I will give a briefing of recent science results from 6 submitted/published papers; 3) I will report on progress made investigating the performance of the massively parallel I/O module (bigfile) that is used in the BlueTides simulation via the BW-PAID program [with Markus Scheucher]; 4) I will also discuss the status of our recent efforts to improve the scaling of the hydrodynamics module.