Particle simulation of 3D galactic hydrodynamics on the ICL DAP

✍ Scribed by T.C. Johns; A.H. Nelson

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1985
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 756 KB
• Volume: 37
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0010-4655
• DOI: 10.1016/0010-4655(85)90169-9

✦ Synopsis

A non-self-gravitating galactic hydrodynamics code based on a quasi-particle technique and making use of a mesh for force evaluation and sorting purposes is described. The short-range nature of the interparticle pressure forces, coupled with the use of a mesh allows a particularly fast algorithm. The 3D representation of the galaxy is mapped onto the "3D" main store of the ICL DAP in a natural way, the 2 spatial dimensions in the plane of the galaxy becoming the 2 dimensions of the processor plane on the DAP and the third dimension varying within individual processor storage elements. This leads to a fairly straightforward implementation and a high degree of parallelism in the crucial parts of the code. The particle shuffling which is necessary after each timestep is facilitated by the use of a parallel variant of the bitonic sorting algorithm. Some results of simulations using a 63 x 63 x16 mesh and about 50000 particles to follow the evolution of a model disk galaxy are presented.