Cosmic Structure Formation on Supercomputers (and laptops)

Benjamin Moster and Ewald Puchwein

Michaelmas Term 2014

We will present state-of-the-art techniques for simulating cosmic structure formation on modern supercomputers. This includes techniques for following the gravitational collapse of structures, the hydrodynamics and a variety of star formation and feedback physics. In addition, there will be practical examples, i.e. simulations that can be performed and analyzed by the participants on their own laptop computers.

Topics that will be covered:

• Motivation for simulations & Semi-Analytic models
• Initial conditions for simulations
• Gravity algorithms & parallelization
• Hydro schemes (adaptive mesh refinement, moving-mesh, smoothed particle hydrodynamics)
• Following radiative cooling & photoheating
• Subresolution physics (star formation, supernova & AGN feedback)
• Semi-Analytic models
• How to use the Gadget2 code (examples: cosmological box, galaxy collision)

Lecture 1 (Ben, Oct 14)
topics:

• Introduction to cosmological simulations and semi-analytic models
• Cosmological initial conditions

Lecture 2 (Ewald, Oct 21)
topics:

• Gravity solvers
• Parallelization

Lecture 3 (Ewald, Oct 28)
topics:

• Hydrodynamics
• Hydro solvers (Eulerian & moving-mesh)
  

Lecture 4 (Ben, Nov 4)
topics:

• smoothed particle hydrodynamics
  
• radiative cooling/heating
• subresolution models

Lecture 5 (Ben, Nov 11)
topics:

• halo-finders
• semi-analytic models

Lecture 6 (Ewald, Nov 18)
topics:

• Exercise 1: Performing a cosmological simulation with the Gadget-2 code
  

Lecture 7 (Ewald, Nov 25)
topics:

• Exercise 1: Analyzing a cosmological simulation (halo finding, halo mass function, maps)
  

Lecture 8 (Ben, Dec 2)
topics:

• Exercise 2: Simulating a galaxy collision

The Gadget-2 code

In the second half of the course we will do some exercises with the Gadget-2 cosmological simulation code. It can be downloaded here:
http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/gadget/gadget-2.0.7.tar.gz