English

The Arepo public code release

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2020-06-17 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics Astrophysics of Galaxies Computational Physics

Abstract

We introduce the public version of the cosmological magnetohydrodynamical moving-mesh simulation code Arepo. This version contains a finite-volume magnetohydrodynamics algorithm on an unstructured, dynamic Voronoi tessellation coupled to a tree-particle-mesh algorithm for the Poisson equation either on a Newtonian or cosmologically expanding spacetime. Time-integration is performed adopting local timestep constraints for each cell individually, solving the fluxes only across active interfaces, and calculating gravitational forces only between active particles, using an operator-splitting approach. This allows simulations with high dynamic range to be performed efficiently. Arepo is a massively distributed-memory parallel code, using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) communication standard and employing a dynamical work-load and memory balancing scheme to allow optimal use of multi-node parallel computers. The employed parallelization algorithms of Arepo are deterministic and produce binary-identical results when re-run on the same machine and with the same number of MPI ranks. A simple primordial cooling and star formation model is included as an example of sub-resolution models commonly used in simulations of galaxy formation. Arepo also contains a suite of computationally inexpensive test problems, ranging from idealized tests for automated code verification to scaled-down versions of cosmological galaxy formation simulations, and is extensively documented in order to assist adoption of the code by new scientific users.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1909.04667,
  title  = {The Arepo public code release},
  author = {Rainer Weinberger and Volker Springel and Rüdiger Pakmor},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.04667},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

39 pages, 15 figures, accepted in ApJS, https://www.arepo-code.org, repository: https://gitlab.mpcdf.mpg.de/vrs/arepo

R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:11:33.280Z