The Formation of Galaxies: A Challenge for Supercomputers -- a Simple Task for GRAPE ?

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dc.creatorSteinmetz, Matthias
dc.date1994-02-21
dc.date.accessioned2026-07-07T02:19:05Z
dc.date.available2026-07-07T02:19:05Z
dc.descriptionWe present numerical simulations of galaxy formation, one of the most challenging problems in computational astrophysics. The key point in such simulations is the efficient solution of the N--body problem. If the gas of a galaxy is treated by means of smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), the hydrodynamic equations can be reduced to a form similar to that of the N--body problem. A straightforward implementation requires a computational effort $\propto N^2$, making it prohibitively expensive to simulate systems larger than $10^5$ particles even on the largest available supercomputers. After a description of the physical and numerical problems, we shortly review the standard numerical methods to tackle these problems and discuss their advantages and drawbacks. We also present a completely different approach to perform such simulations using a workstation in combination with the special purpose hardware {\sc Grape}. After a discussion of the main features of {\sc Grape}, we present a simple implementation of a {\sc SPH}--N--body code on such a configuration. Comparing results and performance of these two approaches, we show, that with an investment of US \$ 50000, the problem can be solved up to 5 times faster than on a {\sc Cray} YMP.
dc.description7 pages, compressed uu-encoded postscript file (116kB), contribution to the exhibition on High Performance Computing and Networking (HPCN94), Munich, April 18-20, 1994
dc.identifierhttps://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9402050
dc.identifierhttp://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9402050
dc.identifier.urihttp://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/9729
dc.subjectAstrophysics
dc.titleThe Formation of Galaxies: A Challenge for Supercomputers -- a Simple Task for GRAPE ?
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