NBody and VR

CI: – Pascal Elahi

We request the equivalent of 14 weeks from a software developer with expertise in HPC (MPI, OpenMP, pthreads) to integrate cosmological N-Body code(s) with a state-of-the-art halo finder, VELOCIraptor, to enable on-the-fly halo finding. N-Body/Hydrodynamical simulations follow the formation and evolution of cosmic structures (dark matter halos, galaxies). The simulations are paired with halo finders to identify cosmic structures of interest, typically dark matter halos, by writing a snapshot of particle information to disk, which is then read and processed by VELOCIraptor. The high cadence halo catalogs required coupled with 1-20 TB snapshot sizes severely limits the size of the simulations that can be run.
Integrating VELOCIraptor into an N-body code would not only reduce the computational resources taken by these simulations but also enable us to run even larger volume, higher resolution simulations that would, when coupled to other codes such as semi-analytic models of galaxy formation, produce synthetic galaxy populations critical to understanding both the high redshift universe and lower redshift HI universe probed by ongoing (e.g., DEVILS, GAMA, MWA, LOFAR, ASKAP) and future (e.g., WAVES, SKA) surveys.