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arXiv · 1909.04667

The Arepo public code release

Abstract

We introduce the public version of the cosmological magnetohydrodynamical moving-mesh simulation code Arepo. This version contains a finite-volume magnetohydrodynamics algorithm on an unstructured, dynamic Voronoi tessellation coupled to a tree-particle-mesh algorithm for the Poisson equation either on a Newtonian or cosmologically expanding spacetime. Time-integration is performed adopting local timestep constraints for each cell individually, solving the fluxes only across active interfaces, and calculating gravitational forces only between active particles, using an operator-splitting approach. This allows simulations with high dynamic range to be performed efficiently. Arepo is a massively distributed-memory parallel code, using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) communication standard and employing a dynamical work-load and memory balancing scheme to allow optimal use of multi-node parallel computers. The employed parallelization algorithms of Arepo are deterministic and produce binary-identical results when re-run on the same machine and with the same number of MPI ranks. A simple primordial cooling and star formation model is included as an example of sub-resolution models commonly used in simulations of galaxy formation. Arepo also contains a suite of computationally inexpensive test problems, ranging from idealized tests for automated code verification to scaled-down versions of cosmological galaxy formation simulations, and is extensively documented in order to assist adoption of the code by new scientific users.

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Rainer Weinberger, Volker Springel, Rüdiger Pakmor. 2019-09-10. The Arepo public code release. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4365/ab908c

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