Enzo1.5/About

About Enzo v1.5

Description

Enzo is an adaptive mesh refinement (AMR), grid-based hybrid (hydro + N-Body) code which is designed to do simulations of cosmological structure formation. It uses the algorithms of Berger & Colella to improve spatial and temporal resolution in regions of large gradients, such as gravitationally collapsing objects. The Enzo simulation software is incredibly flexible, and can be used to simulate a wide range of astrophysical and cosmological situations with the physics packages described below (see Features, below). Optionally, Enzo can be used as a non-cosmological hydrodynamics code, or as a pure cosmological N-body code.

Enzo has been parallelized using the MPI message-passing library and can run on any shared- or distributed-memory parallel supercomputer or PC cluster. Simulations using as many as 1024 processors have been successfully carried out on the San Diego Supercomputing Center's Blue Horizon, an IBM SP.

Enzo was first released to the public on March 1, 2004. Version 1.5 was released in June 2008. To obtain a copy of the code go to the download page. For more information please contact enzo-l@… at the Laboratory for Computational Astrophysics.

Features

Version 1.5 of Enzo includes the following physics and features:

  • N-body gravitational dynamics using the particle-mesh method
  • hydrodynamics using both the piecewise parabolic method (PPM) and the finite-difference method used in the Zeus MHD code.
  • The capability to follow up to 12 species of H and He (including deuterium)
  • Radiative cooling, using either an assumed metallicity or calculated directly from primordial species abundances
  • Uniform ultraviolet backgrounds based on work by Haardt & Madau
  • Recipes for star formation and feedback within cosmological simulations
  • Tracer particles
  • Highly scalable parallel I/O using the HDF5 data model (one file per processor)
  • A versatile system for non-cosmological units
  • An expanded set of test problems and a full regression testing suite

Authors

Enzo was originally written by Greg Bryan under the supervision of Michael Norman while at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. Enzo's home is the Laboratory for Computational Astrophysics at the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences, located at the University of California in San Diego. Currently, Enzo is being developed by (in alphabetical order) Tom Abel, James Bordner, Greg Bryan, David Collins, Robert Harkness, Alexei Kritsuk, Brian O'Shea, Pascal Paschos, Alex Razoumov, Dan Reynolds, Stephen Skory, Matthew Turk, and Rick Wagner. This team is led by Michael Norman, the director of the Laboratory for Computational Astrophysics.

Acknowledgements

Enzo has been developed with the support of the National Science Foundation to the Laboratory for Computational Astrophysics via grants ASC-9318185, AST-9803137, AST-0307690, and AST-0708960; the National Center for Supercomputing Apllications via PACI subaward ACI-9619019; and the San Diego Supercomputer Center via the Strategic Applications Partners program. Greg Bryan acknowledges support from NSF grants AST-0507161, AST-0547823 and AST-0606959.