Last revised September 6, 2010

Introduction

GRACOS is a software package (code) including a fast executable for cosmological N-body simulations and data analysis. The name stands for the title of "GRAvitational COSmology".

The GRACOS package was developed at MIT and CITA by Alexander Shirokov, under the advice of Prof. Edmund Bertschinger.

The latest bugfix version gracos-9211-AA is now available (download it, or see the release notes for news).

Features

  • Standard GNU build and install procedure
  • Embedded script environment and runtime administration
  • Cosmological initial conditions generator, including non-gaussian initial conditions
  • Particle data imager and mass density power spectrum estimator
  • Particle position and velocity integrator with a choice between KDK and DKD integration schemes; Plummer force softening
  • File Input and Output with five supported serial and one distributed data formats
  • Parallelization for a Message Passing Interface (MPI) environment
  • Version specific documentaition in HTML and PDF formats included in each distribution
  • Free software, released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

    Documentation

    You can read the manual for GRACOS 1.0.1 alpha10 online (also in PDF format).

    Technical description of the main optimization techniques specially developed for GRACOS: parallel domain decomposition with Hilbert curve, sorting, and the adaptive P3M are presented in Chapters 2 and 3 of Alexander Shirokov PhD Thesis at MIT (submitted in March 2005). Chapter 2 is also available as astro-ph/0505087. If you wish to cite GRACOS in your work we recommend the above two publications BibTeX.

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    If you have comments, questions, or suggestions regarding GRACOS, don't hesitate to email us.

    This web space is hosted by the Canadian Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA)