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Improving Swift
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| Understanding the formation of planets is one of the most fundamental problems facing astronomy today. It is also an area of great current interest since NASA has determined that understanding the origin and evolution of our solar system and planetary systems around other stars is one of its fundamental scientific goals. Perhaps the best method for understanding how the solar system formed is by performing large-scale numerical experiments. Such simulations require computer codes that can integrate the orbits of a large number of bodies for, in many cases, timescales approaching the age of the solar system. Over the last 10 years, PI Levison and CoI Duncan have developed a software package, known as Swift, capable of performing these types of simulations. Swift quickly became an industry standard for the planetary community, and is used all over the world. Here we propose to make several fundamental improvements to Swift that would significantly enhance its utility to the planetary community. We plan to: (1) employ more sophisticated methods for calculation the forces between objects, (2) parallelize parts of the code to take advantage of the current popularity of Beowulf clusters, and (3) rewrite the code and thereby utilize more efficient data structures. |
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