HTML version of Scripted Foils prepared 29 December 1996

Foil 6 Particle Dynamics and Example of Astrophysics

From CPS615-Physical Simulation Techniques and Structure of CFD Equations Delivered Lectures of CPS615 Basic Simulation Track for Computational Science -- 14 November 96. by Geoffrey C. Fox *
Secs 76.3
1 Astrophysics has several important particle dynamics problems where new particles are not atoms but rather stars, clusters of stars, galaxies or clusters of galaxies.
2 The numerical algorithm is similar but there is an important new approach because we have a lot of particles (currently over N=107) and all particles interact with each other.
3 This naively has a computational complexity of O(N2) at each time step but a clever numerical method reduces it to O(N) or O (NlogN).
4 Physics problems addressed include:
  • Evolution of early universe structure of today
  • Why are galaxies spiral?
  • What happens when galaxies collide?
  • What makes globular clusters (with O(106) stars) like they are?

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