Related papers: The computer BESK and an early attempt to simulate…
Galaxy simulations have come a long way from the early days of simple N-body calculations, which considered only gravitational interactions, to the complex, multi-physics models used today. Beginning with initial conditions representative…
We describe the astrophysical and numerical basis of N-body simulations, both of collisional stellar systems (dense star clusters and galactic centres) and collisionless stellar dynamics (galaxies and large-scale structure). We explain and…
These lectures are intended to provide an introduction to the rich interplay between N-body simulations and stellar-kinematic observations of galaxies. The first section describes the kinematic properties of galaxies that are accessible to…
I begin with a brief history of N-body simulation and visualization and then go on to describe various methods for creating images and animations of modern simulations in cosmology and galactic dynamics. These techniques are incorporated…
Gravitational N-body simulations, that is numerical solutions of the equations of motions for N particles interacting gravitationally, are widely used tools in astrophysics, with applications from few body or solar system like systems all…
In the half century since the 1950s computer simulation has transformed our understanding of physics. The rare, expensive, slow, and bulky mainframes of World War II have given way to today's millions of cheap, fast, desksized workstations…
I review recent progress in numerically simulating the formation and evolution of galaxies in hierarchically clustering universes. Special emphasis is given to results based on high-resolution gas dynamical simulations using the N-body…
Direct gravitational simulations of n-body systems have a time complexity O(n^2), which gets computationally expensive as the number of bodies increases. Distributing this workload to multiple cores significantly speeds up the computation…
Space-based observations are beginning to yield detailed information about the stellar kinematics at the very centers of galaxies, within the sphere of gravitational influence of the black hole. The structure and dynamics of these regions…
The subjects and key questions faced by computational astrophysics using N-body simulations are discussed in the fields of globular star cluster dynamics, galactic nuclei and cosmological structure formation. After a comparison of the…
The modern study of the dynamics of stellar systems requires the use of high-performance computers. Indeed, an accurate modelization of the structure and evolution of self-gravitating systems like planetary systems, open clusters, globular…
In this contribution a broad overview of the methodologies of cosmological N-body simulations and a short introduction explaining the general idea behind such simulations is presented. After explaining how to set up the initial conditions…
We discuss the performance of direct summation codes used in the simulation of astrophysical stellar systems on highly distributed architectures. These codes compute the gravitational interaction among stars in an exact way and have an…
I review recent progress from $N$-body simulations in our understanding of the secular evolution of isolated disk galaxies. I describe some of the recent controversies in the field which have been commonly attributed to numerics. The…
I present examples of how chemo-dynamical N-body simulations can help understanding the structure and evolution of the inner Galaxy. Such simulations reproduce the observed links between kinematics, morphology and chemistry in the bar/bulge…
I review the Marseille GRAPE systems and the N-body simulations done with them. I first describe briefly the available hardware and software, their possibilities and their limitations. I then describe work done on interacting galaxies and…
Astrophysical Challenges which demand the solution of the one million (or more) gravitating body problem are briefly discussed for the fields of cosmology, galactic nuclei and globular star clusters. Results from the classical three-body…
The recent availability of special purpose computers designed for calculating gravitational interactions of N-bodies at extremely high speed has provided the means to model globular clusters on a star-by-star basis for the first time. By…
We discuss early results from the first large N-body/hydrodynamical simulation to resolve the formation of galaxies in a cold dark matter universe. The simulation follows the formation of galaxies by gas cooling within dark halos of mass a…
As known, any numerical simulation is composed of two parts: (1) the initial part of writing the relevant code and (2) the running of this code on the computer screen. The second part of running the program is extensively discussed…