Introduction to GADGET-4

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GADGET-4 is a massively parallel code for N-body/hydrodynamical cosmological simulations. It is a flexible code that can be applied to a variety of different types of simulations, offering a number of sophisticated simulation algorithms. An account of the numerical algorithms employed by the code is given in the original code paper, subsequent publications, and this documentation.

GADGET-4 was written mainly by Volker Springel, with important contributions and suggestions being made by numerous people, including Ruediger Pakmor, Oliver Zier, and Martin Reinecke.

Except in very simple test problems, one or more specialized code options will typically be used. These are broadly termed modules and are activated through compile-time flags. Each module may have several optional compile-time options and/or parameter file values.

Overview and history

In its current implementation, the simulation code GADGET-4 (GA laxies with D ark matter and G as int E rac T - this peculiar acronym hints at the code's origin as a tool for studying galaxy collisions) supports collisionless simulations and smoothed particle hydrodynamics on massively parallel computers. All communication between concurrent execution processes is done either explicitly by means of the message passing interface (MPI), or implicitly through shared-memory accesses on processes on multi-core nodes. The code is mostly written in ISO C++ (assuming the C++11 standard), and should run on all parallel platforms that support at least MPI-3. So far, the compatibility of the code with current Linux/UNIX-based platforms has been confirmed on a large number of systems.

The code can be used for plain Newtonian dynamics, or for cosmological integrations in arbitrary cosmologies, both with or without periodic boundary conditions. Stretched periodic boxes, and special cases such as simulations with two periodic dimensions and one non-periodic dimension are supported as well. The modeling of hydrodynamics is optional. The code is adaptive both in space and in time, and its Lagrangian character makes it particularly suitable for simulations of cosmic structure formation. Several post-processing options such as group- and substructure finding, or power spectrum estimation are built in and can be carried out on the fly or applied to existing snapshots. Through a built-in cosmological initial conditions generator, it is also particularly easy to carry out cosmological simulations. In addition, merger trees can be determined directly by the code.

The main reference for numerical and algorithmic aspects of the code is the paper "Simulating cosmic structure formation with the GADGET-4 code" (Springel et al., 2020, MNRAS, submitted), and references therein. Further information on the previous public versions of GADGET can be found in "The cosmological simulation code GADGET-2" (Springel, 2005, MNRAS, 364, 1105), and in "GADGET: A code for collisionless and gas-dynamical cosmological simulations" (Springel, Yoshida & White, 2001, New Astronomy, 6, 51). It is recommended to read these papers before attempting to use the code. This documentation provides additional technical information about the code, hopefully in a sufficiently self-contained fashion to allow anyone interested to learn using the code for cosmological N-body/SPH simulations on parallel machines.

Most core algorithms in GADGET-4 have been written by Volker Springel and constitute evolved and improved versions of earlier implementations in GADGET-2 and GADGET-3. Substantial contributions to the code have also been made by all the authors of the GADGET-4 code paper. Note that the code is made publicly available under the GNU general public license. This implies that you may freely copy, distribute, or modify the sources, but the copyright for the original code remains with the authors. If you find the code useful for your scientific work, we kindly ask you to include a reference to the code paper on GADGET-4 in all studies that use simulations carried out with the code.

Disclaimer

It is important to note that the performance and accuracy of the code is a sensitive function of some of the code parameters. We also stress that GADGET-4 comes without any warranty, and without any guarantee that it produces correct results. If in doubt about something, reading (and potentially improving) the source code is always the best strategy to understand what is going on!

Please also note the following:

The numerical parameter values used in the examples contained in the code distribution do not represent a specific recommendation by the authors! In particular, we do not endorse these parameter settings in any way as standard values, nor do we claim that they will provide fully converged results for the example problems, or for other initial conditions. We think that it is extremely difficult to make general statements about what accuracy is sufficient for certain scientific goals, especially when one desires to achieve it with the smallest possible computational effort. For this reason we refrain from making such recommendations. We encourage every simulator to find out for herself/himself what integration settings are needed to achieve sufficient accuracy for the system under study. We strongly recommend to make convergence and resolution studies to establish the range of validity and the uncertainty of any numerical result obtained with GADGET-4.