Splotch

Abstract

Authors

• Universitäs-Sternwarte München
  Klaus Dolag (dolag<at>usm.uni-muenchen.de)
  
• Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics
  Martin Reinecke (martin<at>mpa-garching.mpg.de)
  
• University of Oxford
  Marzia Rivi (Marzia.Rivi<at>astro.ox.ac.uk)
  
• ETH-CSCS
  Claudio Gheller (cgheller<at>cscs.ch)
  
• University of Portsmouth
  Mel Krokos (mel.krokos<at>port.ac.uk)
  Tim Dykes (cam01992<at>myport.ac.uk)
  Zhefan Jin (zhefan.jin<at>gmail.com)
  
  

Copyrights and Acknowledgements

• Splotch is free software, distributed under the GNU General Public License. This implies that you may freely distribute and copy the software. You may also modify it as you wish, and distribute these modified versions as long as you indicate prominently any changes you made in the original code, and as long as you leave the copyright notices, and the no-warranty notice intact. Please read the General Public License for more details. Note that the authors retain their copyright on the code.
• Requested Acknowledgement
  The authors kindly ask you to acknowledge the use of the Splotch package in your publications in the following form:

  At the first image produced with Splotch, a footnote placed in the main body of the paper referring to the Splotch web-site - currently http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/~kdolag/Splotch

Code Papers

• Splotch: visualizing cosmological simulations (New Journal of Physics, Volume 10, Issue 12, pp. 125006, 2008).
• High-performance astrophysical visualization using Splotch (ICCS 2010 conference).
• CUDA-Splotch: GPU Visualization of Astrophysical Data (Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XXII conference).
• A new view of observed galaxies through 3D modelling and visualisation (Astronomy and Computing, 3400448, 2021).

Download source code

Splotch is written in the C++ language.

Please check your compiler for the OpenMP flags if you want to use OpenMP functionality (-fopenmp).

If you have an MPI environment installed, you can also use mpiCC instead of g++ and add the option "-DUSE_MPI" to activate the MPI implementation.

The souce code is now available through the public git repository.

Pre git code version

To install it you just have to unpack splotch_4.4.tar.gz, edit the Makefile to suit your needs and type make.

History

• 11.11.2013: contains the final CUDA version, Ramses reader and a previewer
  v 6.0
• 31.1.2011: Minor updates, including endian detection for Gadget2 files.
  v 4.4
• 30.10.2010: Introduce stereoscopic mode by adding EyeSeparation parameter.
  v 4.3
• 19.10.2010: Small updates to allow exploration of parameter settings.
  v 4.2
• 12.7.2010: Further code reorganization to separate scene maker from the renderer. Additional speed up of the renderer. GPU support (via CUDA) still preliminary. Patched on 22.7.2010.
  Note that the format of the parameter file has been updated again!
  v 4.1a
• 25.11.2009: Major code reorganization to be much more modular. Now contains readers for different file formats, is fully MPI/OpenMP parallelized and allows to utilize GPUs (via CUDA).
  Note that the format of the parameter file has changed!
  v 4.0
• 09.06.2009: Fixed some typos in parameter file and source code. Now also supports OpenMP.
  v 3.1
• 11.04.2008: Many improvements, now allows to select individual smoothing lengths for stars, freely select a block to visualize, color palette is now read from files, or select a 3-vector to represent the colors from file.
  v 3.0
• 16.08.2006: Many improvements, now allows to process a geometry file to render several different aspects of a single simulation without reloading the data from disk.
  v 2.0
• 22.07.2005: Many improvements, v 1.1
• 07.02.2005: First public version, v 1.0

Test Example and Documentation

• Binary file of a small cosmological simulation.
• Example parameter file to test Splotch.
• Description of the parameter file.
• A example parameter file to visualize a given color table. The following color tables are distributed with Splotch 4.2 and higher:
  Blue.pal
  Klaus.pal
  M51_stars.pal
  OldSplotch.pal
  RedBlue.jpg
  Yellow.jpg
  BlueSimple.jpg
  LongFancy.pal
  Martin.pal
  Orion.pal
  Stars.pal
  Fancy.pal
  M51.pal
  NewSplotch.pal
  OrionNew1.pal
  Tipsy.pal
  TronInv.pal
  
• To obtain a first guess parameter file for any simulation, just run splotch with this parameter file and modify it according to the output. You will obtain a reasonable image/parameter file as a starting point for further fine tuning. Works with Splotch 4.2 or higher.

Example Images