Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter Computation

Friday, 25 September 2020, 17:39   (virtual room B)

Dynamic Zoom Simulations: a fast, adaptive algorithm for simulating lightcones

Enrico Garaldi, Matteo Nori, Marco Baldi
Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics; University of Bologna; INAF; INFN

The potential of the new generation of large-scale galaxy surveys can be unlocked only through unprecedented numerical efforts, that combine high resolution and very large simulated volumes. These simultaneous requirements, however, pose serious technical challenges, because of their large computational and data storage demand. I will present a novel simulation approach dubbed Dynamic Zoom Simulations – or DZS – developed to tackle these issues. This method is tailored to the production of lightcone outputs from N-body numerical simulations, which allow for a more efficient storage and post-processing compared to standard comoving snapshots, and more directly mimic the format of survey data. I will show that DZS can achieve virtually identical results to traditional simulations at a fraction of the computational cost. In particular, I will focus on large-scale properties of the matter distribution in the Universe, showing that e. g. the halo mass function, the 2D and 3D lightcone as well as the position of individual particles is recovered to sub-percent accuracy. DZS builds upon traditional N-body simulations, allowing the plethora of algorithms developed for the latter to be seamlessly employed, and rendering easy its extension to any particle-based simulation field, like e. g. smoothed particles hydrodynamics quantities.