A Cosmological Structure Formation Simulation

Paul Bode (MIT), Renyue Cen (Princeton), Jeremiah Ostriker, (Princeton), and Guohong Xu (UCSC), as part of GC3.

The computation was done on 64 and 128 nodes of the IBM SP2 at the Cornell Theory Center; it uses 134 million grid points and 17 million particles. The total running time was four and a half days. Gravity is computed using the Particle-Mesh method; gas equations are solved using the TVD (Total Variation Diminishing) method. (For details on this method see Renyue Cen and Jeremiah Ostriker astro-ph/9404012 and the references therein.) The parallel code is discussed in more detail in a HTML-format paper which will appear in Supercomputing '96.

GIFS

The initial dark matter density (redshift z=40); perturbations from the mean density are small:

Dark matter density at z=0 (today); the white region is over 250 times denser than the mean:

The initial gas density (redshift z=40):

The gas density at z=0:

Temperature of the gas at z=0; black regions are less than 100,000 degrees Kelvin, white regions are over 50 million degrees:

Also available: what the gas would appear like in the X-ray at z=0.

MPEGS:

Smaller run (256 mesh points on a side)

Larger run (512 mesh points on a side)