Scripted HTML version of 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
Astrophysics has several important particle dynamics problems where new particles are not atoms but rather stars, clusters of stars, galaxies or clusters of galaxies.
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.
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).
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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