At the dawn of the universe – just after the Big Bang – all matter was in the form of a hot-flowing soup called quark-gluon plasma, or QGP. Large-scale computations have been critical to the theoretical study of QGP’s novel characteristics. As part of a theoretical effort funded by the Department of Energy, Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Swagato Mukherjee and his colleagues are using an allotment of 167 million processor hours from the ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) to better understand QGP. Their findings will help physicists plan the next wave of experiments. “Neither theory nor experiment can do this alone,” Mukherjee says. Using their ALCC allotment, Mukherjee and his colleagues have concentrated on a version of this theory, lattice QCD, to computationally study the plasma on Titan, a Cray XK7 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. These types of computations will be critical for future experiments at the big colliders. Read more at https://deixismagazine.org/2016/06/early-universe-soup/