ChaNGa

ChaNGa (Charm N-body GrAvity solver) is a code to perform collisionless N-body simulations. It can perform cosmological simulations with periodic boundary conditions in comoving coordinates or simulations of isolated stellar systems. It also can include hydrodynamics using the Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) technique. It uses a Barnes-Hut tree to calculate gravity, with hexadecapole expansion of nodes and Ewald summation for periodic forces. Timestepping is done with a leapfrog integrator with individual timesteps for each particle.

ChaNGa's novel feature is to use the dynamic load balancing scheme of the Charm++ runtime system in order to obtain good performance on massively parallel systems. See our Computational Cosmology and Astrophysics article for scaling results up to 512,000 processors.

If you choose to use ChaNGa for scientific work, please reference the code papers:

P. Jetley, F. Gioachin, C. Mendes, L. V. Kale, and T. R. Quinn. Massively parallel cosmological simulations with ChaNGa. In Proceedings of IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium 2008, 2008.

P. Jetley, L. Wesolowski, F. Gioachin, L. V. Kale, and T. R. Quinn. Scaling hierarchical n-body simulations on gpu clusters. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM/IEEE International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, SC ’10, Washington, DC, USA, 2010. IEEE Computer Society.

Menon, H., Wesolowski, L., Zheng, G., Jetley, P., Kale, L., Quinn, T., Governato, F., 2015. Adaptive Techniques for Clustered N-Body Cosmological Simulations, Computational Astrophysics and Cosmology, 2, 1.

ChaNGa uses the Tipsy file format for I/O.