List of Astrophysics Codes

This is a list of some of the Astrophysics codes that are on the current priority list for being adapted for easy use on HPC machines. Please click on the code name to be linked to the code webpage. For support with running these codes you might contact simulations@punch4nfdi.de.

The list is publically available at https://go.fzj.de/astro-codes

• ADIPLS

  Development of the Aarhus adiabatic pulsation code started around 1978. Although the main features have been stable for more than a decade, development of the code is continuing, concerning numerical properties and output. The code has been provided as a generally available package and has seen substantial use at a number of installations. Further development of the package, including bringing the documentation closer to being up to date, is planned as part of the HELAS Coordination Action.

• Arepo

  Arepo is a massively parallel gravity and magnetohydrodynamics code for astrophysics, designed for problems of large dynamic range. It employs a finite-volume approach to discretize the equations of hydrodynamics on a moving Voronoi mesh, and a tree-particle-mesh method for gravitational interactions. Arepo is originally optimized for cosmological simulations of structure formation, but has also been used in many other applications in astrophysics.

• ATHENA++

  Athena++ is a complete re-write of the Athena astrophysical magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) code in C++. Compared to earlier versions, the Athena++ code has (1) much more flexible coordinate and grid options including adaptive mesh refinement (AMR), (2) new physics including general relativity, (3) significantly improved performance and scalability, and (4) improved source code clarity and modularity.

• BHAC on gitlab.itp.uni-frankfurt.de

  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 space-times, using an efficient block based approach.

• Bonsai on GitHub

  Bonsai is a GPU gravitational [Barnes-Hut]-tree code. There also exists a version for SPH application.

• CASA

  CASA, the Common Astronomy Software Applications package, is the primary data processing software for the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and NSF's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), and is frequently used also for other radio telescopes. The CASA software can process data from both single-dish and aperture-synthesis telescopes, and one of its core functionalities is to support the data reduction and imaging pipelines for ALMA, VLA and the VLA Sky Survey (VLASS).

• CASTRO on GitHub

  CASTRO is part of the AMReX suite of astrophysical hydrodynamics codes that collectively provide the simulation capabilities to model explosive astrophysical phenomena. Castro specializes in near-sonic and supersonic flows, where reactions can be an important driver of the dynamics. Radiation and magnetic contributions are supported. A lot of emphasis is placed on accurately coupling reactions and hydro, with a variety of time-stepping techniques available.

• CHANGA on GitHub

  CHANGA is collisionless  a N-body simualtion code, also including smooth particle hydrodynics. It incorporates a generalized parallel programming framework called Charm++  that provides the means to share the computation among many processors. It also uses SPH solvers from Gasoline. It is used with the Romolus cosmoloical simulations.

• Enzo on GitHub

  Enzo is a community-developed adaptive mesh refinement simulation code, designed for rich, multi-physics hydrodynamic astrophysical calculations. It uses block-structured adaptive mesh refinement to provide high spatial and temporal resolution for modeling astrophysical fluid flows. The code is Cartesian, can be run in 1, 2, and 3 dimensions, and supports a wide variety of physics including hydrodynamics, ideal and non-ideal magnetohydrodynamics, N-body dynamics, primordial gas chemistry, optically-thin radiative cooling of primordial and metal-enriched plasmas, radiation transport, cosmological expansion, and models for star formation and feedback in a cosmological context.

• FARGO3D

  FARGO3D is a versatile multifluid HD/MHD code that runs on clusters of CPUs or GPUs, with special emphasis on protoplanetary disks.

• Flash

  The FLASH code is adiation MHD simulation code for plasma physics and astrophysics. It solves the fully compressible, reactive hydrodynamic equations and allows for the use of adaptive mesh refinement. It also contains state-of-the-art modules for the equations of state and thermonuclear reaction networks.

• Front3D

  FRONT3D is an open-source cartesian three-dimensional parallel code, under active development.It contains the following physics: Hydrodynamics, MHD, Premixed chemical (or nuclear) reactions, Front tracking method for burning flames, Thermoconductivity, Turbulent k-epsilon model and is designed primarily for the study of astrophysical phenomena, especially nuclear flames in SNIa explosions.

• Gadget 2

  GADGET is a code for cosmological N-body/SPH simulations on massively parallel computers with distributed memory. GADGET uses an explicit communication model that is implemented with the standardized MPI communication interface. It computes gravitational forces with a hierarchical tree algorithm and represents fluids by means of smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH). It follows the evolution of a self-gravitating collisionless N-body system, and allows gas dynamics to be optionally included. GADGET can therefore be used to address a wide array of astrophysically interesting problems, ranging from colliding and merging galaxies, to the formation of large-scale structure in the Universe. With the inclusion of additional physical processes such as radiative cooling and heating, GADGETcan also be used to study the dynamics of the gaseous intergalactic medium, or to address star formation and its regulation by feedback processes.

• Gadget 4 on GitHub

  GADGET4 is a code for cosmological N-body/SPH simulations on massively parallel computers with distributed memory. GADGET uses an explicit communication model that is implemented with the standardized MPI communication interface. It computes gravitational forces with a hierarchical tree algorithm and represents fluids by means of smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH). It follows the evolution of a self-gravitating collisionless N-body system, and allows gas dynamics to be optionally included. GADGET can therefore be used to address a wide array of astrophysically interesting problems, ranging from colliding and merging galaxies, to the formation of large-scale structure in the Universe. With the inclusion of additional physical processes such as radiative cooling and heating, GADGETcan also be used to study the dynamics of the gaseous intergalactic medium, or to address star formation and its regulation by feedback processes.

• Gasoline2 on GitHub

  Gasoline code for parallel hydrodynamics and gravity with identical hydrodynamics to the Changa code. Gasoline is a modern SPH code that prevents sharp jumps in time-steps, uses upgraded kernels and larger neighbour numbers and employs local viscosity limiters. Unique features in Gasoline2 include its Geometric Density Average Force expression, explicit Turbulent Diffusion terms and Gradient-Based shock detection to limit artificial viscosity. This last feature allows Gasoline2 to completely avoid artificial viscosity in non-shocking compressive flows.

• GIZMO

  GIZMO is a flexible, massively-parallel, multi-physics simulation code. The code lets you solve the fluid equations using a variety of different methods -- whatever is best for the problem at hand. It introduces new Lagrangian Godunov-type methods that allow you to solve the fluid equations with a moving particle distribution that is automatically adaptive in resolution and avoids the advection errors, angular momentum conservation errors, and excessive diffusion problems that limit the applicability of “adaptive mesh” (AMR) codes, while simultaneously avoiding the low-order errors inherent to simpler methods like smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH). Meanwhile, self-gravity is solved fast, with fully-adaptive gravitational softenings. And the code is massively parallel — it has been run on everything from a Mac laptop to >1 million CPUs on national supercomputers.

• Mercury

  The Mercury code is a general-purpose N-body integration package for problems in celestial mechanics.

• MESA

  MESA stands for Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA), and is an open-source 1D stellar evolution code.

• Nbody6++GPU on GitHub

  NBODY6 is a direct N-body code for star clusters, and NBODY6++ is the extended version designed for large particle number simulations by supercomputers and NBODY6++GPU, an optimized version of NBODY6++ with hybrid parallelization methods (MPI, GPU, OpenMP, and AVX/SSE) to accelerate large direct N-body simulations, and in particular to solve the million-body problem.

• NIRVANA on GitLab

  NIRVANA MHD simulation of a magnetically collimated jet (magnetic field lines in red), which is driven from a circumplanetary accretion disk. The visualization shows a zoom-in of the global simulation, which covers the entire circumstellar disk. Adaptive grid refinement allows to resolve the flow (streamlines in white) around the embedded planet.

• PeTar on GitHub

  PeTar is a N-body code designed to model collisional stellar systems, where multiplicity (binaries, triples ...) and close encounters are important for dynamical evolution. It combines three integration methods (i) The Barnes-Hut tree (Barnes & Hut 1986) is used to calculate long-range forces between particles, which are integrated with a second-order symplectic leap-frog integrator, (2) the fourth-order Hermite integrator with block time steps (e.g., Aarseth 2003) is applied to integrate the orbits of stars and the centers-of-mass of multiple systems with short-range forces, and (3) the slow-down algorithmic regularization method (SDAR; Wang, Nitadori & Makino 2020) is used to integrate the multiple systems, such as hyperbolic encounters, binaries and hierarchical few-body systems.

• PIConGPU on GitHub

  PIConGPU is a fully relativistic, manycore, 3D3V particle-in-cell (PIC) code. The Particle-in-Cell algorithm is a central tool in plasma physics. It describes the dynamics of a plasma by computing the motion of electrons and ions in the plasma based on  Maxwell’s equations.

• PLUTO

  PLUTO is a numerical solution of mixed hyperbolic/parabolic systems of partial differential equations (conservation laws) targeting high Mach number flows in astrophysical fluid dynamics. The code is designed with a modular and flexible structure whereby different numerical algorithms can be separately combined to solve systems of conservation laws using the finite volume or finite difference approach based on Godunov-type schemes. Equations solved on a structured mesh that can be either static or adaptive. The AMR interface relies on the Chombo library for parallel calculations over block-structured, adaptively refined grids.

• POLARIS

  POLARIS is a 3D Monte Carlo radiative transfer code that allows to simulate intensity and polarization of light emerging from analytical astrophysical models as well as complex magneto-hydrodynamic simulations on various grids. It is capable to perform dust heating, -emission, -scattering, -grain alignment, line radiative transfer, and synchrotron simulations. POLARIS calculates synthetic intensity and polarization maps and makes use of a full set of physical quantities (density, temperature, velocity, magnetic field distribution, and dust grain properties as well as different sources of radiation) as input.

• RADMC-3D

  RADMC-3D is a tool for astrophysical research. It computes the observational appearance of an astrophysical object on the sky of the observer. It solves the non-local radiative transfer problem of dusty media, including thermal radiative transport and scattering.

• RAMSES Bitbucket

  RAMSES was developed in Saclay to study large scale structure and galaxy formation. It is now a rather flexible package to be used for general purpose simulations in self-gravitating fluid dynamics. This code is a grid-based hydro solver with adaptive mesh refinement.  As opposed to "patch-based AMR", cells are refined on a cell by cell basis: it is therefore called a "tree-based AMR".

• REBOUND

  N-body integrator, i.e. a software package that can integrate the motion of particles under the influence of gravity. The particles can represent stars, planets, moons, ring or dust particles.

• STYLEGAN2 on GitHub

  STYLEGAN2 yields results in data-driven unconditional generative image modeling.

• SWIFT

  SWIFT is a hydrodynamics and gravity code for astrophysics and cosmology. It is a computer program designed for running on supercomputers that simulates forces upon matter due to two main things: gravity and hydrodynamics (forces that arise from fluids such as viscosity). The creation and evolution of stars and black holes is also modelled together with the effects they have on their surroundings.

• Phantom

  Phantom is a fast, parallel, modular and low-memory smoothed particle hydrodynamics and magnetohydrodynamics code developed over the last decade for astrophysical applications in three dimensions. The code has been developed with a focus on stellar, galactic, planetary and high energy astrophysics and has already been used widely for studies of accretion discs and turbulence, from the birth of planets to how black holes accrete.

• Whiskycodes

  Whiskycodes evolve the equations of general relativistic hydrodynamics (GRHD) and magnetohydrodynamics (GRMHD) in 3-dimensional Cartesian coordinates on a curved dynamical background. The Whisky codes were developed to compute matter dynamics, magnetic fields and gravitational radiation waveforms for astrophysical systems where general relativity is important. The focus is on mergers of binary systems containing neutron stars.