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Section: Application Domains

Cosmological Simulations

Ramses (http://www.itp.uzh.ch/~teyssier/Site/RAMSES.html ) is a typical computational intensive application used by astrophysicists to study the formation of galaxies. Ramses is used, among other things, to simulate the evolution of a collisionless, self-gravitating fluid called “dark matter” through cosmic time. Individual trajectories of macro-particles are integrated using a state-of-the-art “N body solver”, coupled to a finite volume Euler solver, based on the Adaptive Mesh Refinement technique. The computational space is decomposed among the available processors using a mesh partitioning strategy based on the Peano-Hilbert cell ordering.

Cosmological simulations are usually divided into two main categories. Large scale periodic boxes requiring massively parallel computers are performed on a very long elapsed time (usually several months). The second category stands for much faster small scale “zoom simulations”.