Logo image
Back
A multiphysics and multiscale software environment for modeling astrophysical systems
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

A multiphysics and multiscale software environment for modeling astrophysical systems

Simon Portegies Zwart, Steve McMillan, Stefan Harfst, Derek Groen and Michiko Fujii
New astronomy, v 14(4), pp 369-378
12 Jul 2008
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newast.2008.10.006
Featured in Collection :   UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
url
http://arxiv.org/abs/0807.1996View
SubmittedOpen Access (License Unspecified),  Open

Abstract

Physics - Astrophysics of Galaxies Physics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics Physics - Earth and Planetary Astrophysics Physics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena Physics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics Physics - Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
We present MUSE, a software framework for combining existing computational tools for different astrophysical domains into a single multiphysics, multiscale application. MUSE facilitates the coupling of existing codes written in different languages by providing inter-language tools and by specifying an interface between each module and the framework that represents a balance between generality and computational efficiency. This approach allows scientists to use combinations of codes to solve highly-coupled problems without the need to write new codes for other domains or significantly alter their existing codes. MUSE currently incorporates the domains of stellar dynamics, stellar evolution and stellar hydrodynamics for studying generalized stellar systems. We have now reached a "Noah's Ark" milestone, with (at least) two available numerical solvers for each domain. MUSE can treat multi-scale and multi-physics systems in which the time- and size-scales are well separated, like simulating the evolution of planetary systems, small stellar associations, dense stellar clusters, galaxies and galactic nuclei. In this paper we describe three examples calculated using MUSE: the merger of two galaxies, the merger of two evolving stars, and a hybrid N-body simulation. In addition, we demonstrate an implementation of MUSE on a distributed computer which may also include special-purpose hardware, such as GRAPEs or GPUs, to accelerate computations. The current MUSE code base is publicly available as open source at http://muse.li

Metrics

10 Record Views
159 citations in Web of Science
165 citations in Scopus

Details

UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This publication has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:

#11 Sustainable Cities and Communities

InCites Highlights

Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:

Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
International collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Logo image