Section: New Software and Platforms

New Software

NS2DDV-M: a code for the simulation of inhomogeneous fluid flow

We develop and freely distribute a new version of the matlab code NS2DDV-M (equipped with a graphic interface and an accurate documentation) to promote new collaborations in the domain, allow some easy comparisons with concurrent codes on the same benchmark cases, and compare alternative numerical solution methods. Contacts: Caterina Calgaro & Emmanuel Creusé.

A scientific computing software for fast simulation of large systems of interacting particles

Benoît Merlet and Thomas Rey have developed a set of numerical codes for the numerical simulation of large systems of interacting particles. For a system of $N$ particles, the number of interactions is a quadratic functions of $N$, leading to a quadratic cost of a brut force implementation. This fact limits simulations by “naïve” methods to systems with “only” tenth of thousands of particles. In order to treat larger systems (involving millions of particles), the team has implemented a method based on the Non Uniform Fast Fourier Transform which reduces the computation cost of the interactions to $O(NlogN)$. The NUFFT is used to handle the long range smooth interactions. To treat the possibly singular short range interactions (involving only neighboring particles) a quadtree-like method is used. The method is applied to two kind of problems : computations of the dynamics of interacting particles where a standard ordinary differential equation is used; numerical optimization of the energy of a system of interacting particles thanks to a Nonlinear Conjugate Gradient method.

As an illustration of the efficiency of the code, the team has performed numerical experiments which support the following crystallization conjecture : in 2D, a large number of identical charged particles tend to arrange themselves into a regular triangular lattice.

A user friendly version will be released to the public in 2017.

The Fast Spectral Kinetic Scheme

The Fast Spectral Kinetic Scheme (FSKS), has been jointly developed by researchers from the universities of Ferrara, Toulouse, and Lille, and is the first high-order 7-dimensional deterministic numerical method capable of dealing with the complete physics of rarefied gas dynamics. The FSKM indeed solves the Boltzmann equation in 1 dimension of time, 3 of physical space and 3 of velocity space, and has been used to model accurately aerospace engineering problems such as space shuttle re-entry in the atmosphere or very rarefied gas flow in microscopic devices (Knudsen pump).