General Information

Description
Enzo is an adaptive mesh refinement (AMR), grid-based hybrid code (hydro + N-Body) which is designed to do simulations of cosmological structure formation. It uses the algorithms of Berger & Collela 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 cosmological situations with the physics packages described below (see Features).

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 released to the public on March 1, 2004. To obtain a copy of the code go to the download page. For more information please contact enzo-l@ucsd.edu at the Laboratory for Computational Astrophysics.

Features
The public release of Enzo includes (but is not limited to) the following physics:

  • 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 9 species of H and He
  • Radiative cooling, using either an assumed metallicity or calculated directly from species abundances
  • Uniform ultraviolet backgrounds based on work by Haardt & Madau
  • Fully Parallel I/O using the HDF5 data model

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 and Alex Razoumov. 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 via grants ASC-9318185, AST-9803137, and the National Computational Science Alliance under NSF Cooperative Agreement ASC-9740300, PACI Subaward ACI-9619019.

News
March 1, 2004 - Enzo is released to the public. Go to the download page to get the code bundle.
28 July 2003 - Enzo has been released to Friendly Users! Go to the download page to get the code bundle.
1 July 2003 - Modifications and updates to public website added. Truly informative (yet still occasionally witty) text added. Enzo will be released to friendly users by August 1.
24 Jan 2003 - Witty but uninformative text replaced with witty, semi-informative text. Banana bread recipe added.
23 January 2003 - The Enzo website was created, and there was much rejoicing. Updates are expected to occur at irregular intervals (namely, whenever the website developer is physically threatened) prior to the public release of Enzo in late 2003/early 2004.