Skies And Universes: Accessing cosmological simulations and theoretical
  predictions
  Numerical simulations play a key important role in modern cosmology. Examples
are plenty including the cosmic web - large scale structure of the distribution
of galaxies in space - which was first observed in N-body simulations and later
discovered in observations. The cuspy dark matter halo profiles, the
overabundance of satellites, the Too-Big-Too-Fail problem are other examples of
theoretical predictions that have a dramatic impact on recent developments in
cosmology and galaxy formation. Large observational surveys such as e.g. SDSS,
Euclid, and LSST are intimately connected with extensive cosmological
simulations that provide statistical errors and tests for systematics. Accurate
predictions for baryonic acoustic oscillations and redshift space distortions
from high-resolution and large-volume cosmological simulations are required for
interpretation of these large-scale galaxy/qso surveys. However, most of the
results from extensive computer simulations, that would be greatly beneficial
if publicly available, are still in hands of few research groups. Even when the
simulation data is available, sharing vast amounts of data can be overwhelming.
We argue that there is an effective and simple path to expand the data access
and dissemination of numerous results from different cosmological models. Here
we demonstrate that public access can be effectively provided with relatively
modest resources. Among different results, we release for the astronomical
community terabytes of raw data of th popular Bolshoi and MultiDark
simulations. We also provide numerous results that are focused on mimicking
observational data and galaxy surveys for major projects. Skies and Universes
is a community effort: data are produced and shared by many research groups. We
offer to other cosmologists and astronomers to host their data products in the
skiesanduniverses.org space.
