Enhancing Open Cosmology with Emulator Packaging

Poster presented at the Open Science Conference 2025

Abstract:

In the field of cosmological astrophysics there is growing adoption of AI emulators to speed up numerical calculations necessary for inferring properties of the Universe, such as the behaviours of dark energy, dark matter and the theory of gravity. In our work we have leveraged OS principles to enhance this use in research, by creating a standard framework for the testing, training, accuracy validation, use and – importantly – sharing of these emulators. This involved the creation of a standard “packaging” of the necessary files and metadata, as well as extending existing popular frameworks to make use of this packaging. This standardisation and packaging improves reproducibility and reduces wasted effort and resources due to duplication of otherwise un-reusable emulators, which are often created at great computational expense on HPC clusters. It also reduces barriers to entry for new members of the community in providing ready-made tools which can be used with confidence on a laptop, allowing more diverse sets of analyses of new and interesting cosmological models.