Arepo documentation

Arepo is a massively parallel code for gravitational n-body systems and magnetohydrodynamics, both on Newtonian as well as cosmological background. It is a flexible code that can be applied to a variety of different types of simulations, offering a number of sophisticated simulation algorithms. A description of the numerical algorithms employed by the code is given in the public release paper. For a more detailed discussion about these algorithms, the original code paper and subsequent publications are the best resource. This documentation only addresses the question how to use the different numerical algorithms.

Arepo was written by Volker Springel (vspringel@mpa-garching.mpg.de) with further development by Rüdiger Pakmor (rpakmor@mpa-garching.mpg.de) and contributions by many other authors (www.arepo-code.org/people). The public version of the code was compiled by Rainer Weinberger (rweinberger@aip.de).

Overview

The Arepo code was initially developed to combine the advantages of finite-volume hydrodynamics schemes with the Lagrangian invariance of smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) schemes. To this end, Arepo makes use of an unstructured Voronoi-mesh which is, in its standard setting, moving with the fluid in an quasi-Lagrangian fashion. The fluxes between cells are computed using a finite-volume approach, and further spatial adaptivity is provided by the possibility to add and remove cells from the mesh according to defined criteria. In addition to gas, Arepo allows for a number of additional particle types which interact only gravitationally, as well as for forces from external gravitational potentials.

Arepo is optimized for, but not limited to, cosmological simulations of galaxy formation and consequently for simulations with very high dynamic ranges in space and time. Therefore, Arepo employs an adaptive timestepping for each individual cell and particle as well as a dynamic load and memory balancing scheme. In its current version, Arepo is fully MPI parallel, and tested to run with >10,000 MPI tasks. The exact performance is, however, highly problem and machine dependent.

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 Arepo 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 Arepo.

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