Creating the Virtual Universe
Simon Portegies Zwart, Jeroen Bédorf · IEEE Software · 2016
Simulation software is important to our understanding of the universe. The intrinsic multiphysics aspects are spiced with a range of temporal scales and spatial scales, both of which cover more digits than are available in the standard hardware. This, together with the intrinsic chaotic nature of many physical processes, poses quite a challenge. To meet this challenge, researchers developed the Astronomical Multipurpose Environment (AMUSE). Instead of writing a suite of multiphysics solvers from scratch, AMUSE's developers coupled existing solvers for each physical ingredient. The result is a highly inhomogeneous collection of dedicated solvers with a homogeneous protocol that scales to supercomputers.