Following an extensive analysis of the features and capabilities of current Astrophysics and Cosmology (A&C) codes, eight flagship codes representing the state of the art of HPC in A&C, and covering 70% of the HPC A&C simulations, have been selected for the SPACE re-design activities.
GAlaxies with Dark matter and Gas intEracT is one of the most used codes for large scale cosmological hydrodynamic simulations. It is a N-body code that solves the gravitational and hydrodynamical equations in their Lagrangian form for a large ensemble of particles.
GADGET is part of the PRACE benchmark suite and has been selected to be part of EUPEX code suite.
OpenGadget is the main line of development of the private Gadget3.
Repo: last public release of the parent code - wwwmpa.mpa-garching.mpg.de/galform/gadget
The picture shows a visualization of the stellar component within the Box2b/hr from the Magneticum simulation set. Stars are color coded according to their age, from bluish for young to redish/yellowish for old.
Credit: Dolag et al. 2015
Simulation code: Gadget-3
Vizualisation code: Splotch
CHANGA and GASOLINE are Tree and Smoothed Particle Magnetohydrodynamics codes that are widely used for cosmological galaxy formation simulations. SPH is a purely Lagrangian method, used in numerical simulations of fluids in astrophysics and computational fluid dynamics, among many other fields.
The two codes have the same implementation of astrophysical processes, but CHANGA features parallelisation design with Charm++ which enables scaling up to 128K cores for highly-clustered datasets. It is designed to perform simulations on exascale HPC facilities.
Repo: github.com/N-BodyShop/changa and github.com/N-BodyShop/gasoline
The PLUTO code is a publicly available numerical software for astrophysical plasma simulations.
It is a Eulerian, finite volume, shock-capturing code based on high-order Godunov methods providing
several integration algorithms. It supports both classical and relativistic flows and it is equipped also with a particle module for hybrid MHD-PIC simulations.
PLUTO has now achieved world-leading excellence in different research branches, receiving (on average) ≈ 600 user downloads every year.
Repo: plutocode.ph.unito.it
iPic3D is a fully electromagnetic massively parallel particle in cell based on the semi-implicit approach to address multiple scale problems in plasma physics with application to space, astrophysics, laboratory experiments and nuclear fusion. The code is publicly available and in use by many research teams in Europe, America and China.
A new implementation with the Energy Conserving Semi-Implict method (ECSIM) allows exact energy conservation and increased stability.
Publicly available at: github.com/CmPA/iPic3D
RAMSES is an open source code written by Romain Teyssier (Princeton University) to model astrophysical systems, featuring self-gravitating, magnetised, compressible, radiative fluid flow. Based on the Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) technique, it has been widely used for cosmological simulations of the Universe, isolated as well as cosmological re-simulations of individual galaxies, simulations of molecular clouds, star formation, supernovae remnants, accretion disks around black holes and planets.
It is based on a fully threaded octree. It uses a finite volume second-order Godunov scheme for hydrodynamics and a 2D constraint transport algorithm for magnetic fields. RAMSES scales on a few 10 000s CPUs depending on the nature of the problem. RAMSES is routinely used as a benchmark code for new CPU clusters performance assessment.
Repo: bitbucket.org/rteyssie/ramses
Picture credits: Joakim Rosdahl
BHAC (the Black Hole Accretion Code) is a multidimensional general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics code based on the MPI-AMRVAC framework. BHAC solves the equations of ideal general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics in one, two or three dimensions on arbitrary stationary spacetimes, using an efficient block-based approach.
BHAC has the ability of employing various sets of coordinates (Cartesian, spherical, cylindrical) and is particularly suited to study accretion processes in spacetimes that are not evolved.
Available at: bhac.science
WhiskyTHC is an open source higher-order GRHD code designed to be used as part of the publicly available EinsteinToolkit framework. It leverages a high-level C++ programming paradigm to achieve a high degree of efficiency while remaining modular and easily extensible.
Its main purpose is solving the equations of general-relativistic hydrodynamics on AMR grids by means of high-resolution shock capturing methods. WhiskyTHC also comprises an M0 moment-based scheme for the evolution of neutrino radiation.
Available at: whiskycode.org
The Frankfurt/IllinoisGRMHD code is an extension of the publicly available Illinois GRMHD module from the EinsteinToolkit. It employs a fourth-order accurate finite differencing scheme to solve the equations of general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (GRMHD) and includes a framework that allows for realistic microphysics through the use of temperature and composition dependent Equation of State tables. FIL also comes with its own spacetime evolution module which makes use of an expression template-based library to handle tensor operations efficiently.
The Frankfurt/Illinois codesuite is fully compatible with the EinsteinToolkit framework where it can be used to model extreme Astrophysical scenarios on an AMR grid.
Picture credits: Most et al., 2021