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| GADGET-3 | |
|---|---|
| Name | GADGET-3 |
| Title | GADGET-3 |
| Developer | Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics |
| Released | private research release |
| Operating system | Unix-like |
| Genre | Astrophysical N-body/SPH code |
| License | proprietary (research) |
GADGET-3
GADGET-3 is a widely used astrophysical N-body and smoothed particle hydrodynamics code derived from earlier public releases and employed in large-scale cosmological and galactic simulations. It evolved from public workstreams and private development at major European research institutes and has been central to projects connecting theoretical models with observations from major observatories and surveys. The code underlies numerous high-profile computational studies that intersect with programs at institutions and consortia across astrophysics.
GADGET-3 is a parallel C code designed for collisionless dynamics and gas dynamics, combining N-body methods for dark matter and stars with Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics for baryons; its development lineage traces to predecessors that influenced numerical work at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, University of Cambridge, Harvard University, Stanford University, and other centers. The software is engineered to run on supercomputers used by projects associated with facilities such as the European Southern Observatory, National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Space Telescope Science Institute, and national labs including Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory. Scientists using the code typically link simulations to observational programs like Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Planck, Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-ray Observatory, and surveys planned by Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
GADGET-3 originates from a family of codes created by groups that include the Max Planck Institute and collaborators at universities like Heidelberg University, University of Oxford, Princeton University, and Columbia University. Unlike its public predecessors, GADGET-3 is distributed under restricted research licenses to groups affiliated with those institutions or collaborators from projects funded by agencies such as the European Research Council, National Science Foundation, German Research Foundation, and national space agencies. Development has been coordinated through institutional repositories and collaborative agreements linking working groups involved in consortia like the Illustris and EAGLE projects, often involving partners from KAVLI Institute for Cosmology and national supercomputing centers including PRACE and XSEDE.
The code implements a hierarchical oct-tree algorithm for gravitational forces that shares conceptual roots with methods used by teams at Los Alamos National Laboratory and algorithmic frameworks discussed in literature from Stanford University and MIT. It integrates a domain decomposition scheme for MPI-based parallelism similar to approaches adopted by researchers at Argonne National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The SPH implementation follows algorithmic choices that echo work by groups at University of California, Berkeley and Durham University, and employs time integration and individual timestep schemes discussed in computational studies from CERN and Max Planck Society authors. Mesh-free methods and particle-mesh hybrids used in the code connect conceptually to approaches developed at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and other simulation centers.
Physics modules in the code cover collisionless dynamics, hydrodynamics, radiative cooling, star formation recipes, and subgrid feedback processes, reflecting model choices debated at meetings involving participants from Institute for Advanced Study, Caltech, University of Chicago, and Columbia University. Cooling and heating models reference atomic and molecular processes studied at institutions like NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, while star formation and feedback prescriptions draw on comparisons to empirical results from teams at Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Observatoire de Paris, and research programs tied to European Southern Observatory instrumentation. Additional modules for chemical enrichment and black hole accretion model routines developed in collaborations including investigators from Imperial College London and University of Toronto.
GADGET-3 is optimized for distributed-memory systems using MPI and can scale to tens of thousands of cores on machines at centers such as Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Performance tuning has been informed by parallel performance studies and benchmarking work from NERSC, PRACE, and university groups including ETH Zurich and University of Tokyo. Load balancing, memory footprint, and I/O strategies parallel those developed in HPC projects at Argonne National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory and have been adapted for workflows managed by schedulers like SLURM and PBS Professional.
GADGET-3 has been used in landmark simulation campaigns associated with projects and teams behind Illustris, EAGLE, and subsequent cosmological simulation suites with contributions from researchers at MPIA, Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, University of Cambridge, Princeton University, and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Applications include large-volume cosmological structure formation runs, zoom simulations of galaxy formation compared to surveys such as DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey and COSMOS, and studies of galaxy clusters informed by X-ray programs like Chandra X-ray Observatory and Sunyaev–Zel'dovich measurements from Planck. The code has supported investigations tied to theoretical programs at Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics (Oslo), Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, and observational follow-ups with instruments at Keck Observatory and Very Large Telescope.
GADGET-3 sits in a family of particle-based astrophysical codes alongside public and private projects developed at institutions such as Princeton University (for other codes), University of Zurich, MPIA, Durham University, University of California, Santa Cruz, and international collaborations like Euclid Consortium. Later codes and successors that incorporated lessons from its architecture include projects influenced by teams at Flatiron Institute, Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, and university consortia that produced alternative hydrodynamics schemes and hybrid mesh–particle approaches; these have been compared in code comparison efforts coordinated by groups from Cambridge University, Leiden University, and INAF.
Category:Astrophysical simulation software