Many of the most exciting questions in astrophysics and cosmology, including the majority of observational probes of dark energy, rely on an understanding of the nonlinear regime of structure formation. In order to fully exploit the information available from this regime and to extract cosmological constraints, accurate theoretical predictions are needed. Currently such predictions can only be obtained from costly, precision numerical simulations. The "Coyote Universe'' simulation suite comprises nearly 1,000 N-body simulations at different force and mass resolutions, spanning 38 wCDM cosmologies. This large simulation suite enabled construct of a prediction scheme, or emulator, for the nonlinear matter power spectrum accurate at the percent level out to k~1 h/Mpc. This is the first cosmic emulator for the dark matter power spectrum.

Ostrich emulates surrogate models for complex and expensive functions using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to decompose a signal, then interpolate the PCA weights over the parameters θ using a Gaussian Process interpolator. The code is trained on samples from the expensive functions, recreating and interpolating between those training samples with reduced computational cost, and recalculating for each use.