Numerical Simulations of Astrophysical Plasmas: Status and Perspectives of the Saclay/DAPNIA Software Project

摘要

An extensive program of numerical simulations of astrophysical plasmas is described in terms of its scientific objectives and technical software foundations. This program covers a large spectrum of challenging problems in as-trophysics at various scales, ranging up from cosmological structures formation, down to dynamics of interstellar gas, star evolution and planetary formation. Fundamental physical processes, hydrodynamics, radiative transfer, gravitation, transport, turbulence, diffusion, are implemented in the framework of paral-lelized codes such as RAMSES and HERACLES running on high-performance, massively parallel mainframes. The developments of these algorithms are now addressed in the context of a software project aiming at the optimization of their various components and the mutualization of their resources. This includes data handling, with the migration to the HDF5 hierarchical file format, developments of new algorithms, with the prospect of using the multi-grid approach to obtain higher resolution, visualization and database organization for exploiting the sci-entific results. Visualization aspects are emphasized, with the implementation of a graphical interface based on IDL's object programming interface. This ap-plication is optimized to provide three-dimensional representations of large data sets.