The Quijote Simulations

Abstract

The Q uijote simulations are a set of 44,100 full N -body simulations spanning more than 7000 cosmological models in the hyperplane. At a single redshift, the simulations contain more than 8.5 trillion particles over a combined volume of 44,100 each simulation follows the evolution of 256 3 , 512 3 , or 1024 3 particles in a box of 1 h −1 Gpc length. Billions of dark matter halos and cosmic voids have been identified in the simulations, whose runs required more than 35 million core hours. The Q uijote simulations have been designed for two main purposes: (1) to quantify the information content on cosmological observables and (2) to provide enough data to train machine-learning algorithms. In this paper, we describe the simulations and show a few of their applications. We also release the petabyte of data generated, comprising hundreds of thousands of simulation snapshots at multiple redshifts; halo and void catalogs; and millions of summary statistics, such as power spectra, bispectra, correlation functions, marked power spectra, and estimated probability density functions.