Ahf: Amiga's Halo Finder

TL;DR

The paper introduces AHF, a parallel MPI-based halo finder designed for large cosmological simulations, detailing its algorithm, scalability, and parameter choices to reliably identify halos in massive datasets.

Contribution

It presents the AHF halo finder, a scalable, parallel tool for analyzing large cosmological simulation data, with detailed algorithmic and parameter guidance.

Findings

AHF scales efficiently to high-resolution simulations.

The tool reliably identifies halos in large datasets.

Parameter settings are crucial for accurate results.

Abstract

Cosmological simulations are the key tool for investigating the different processes involved in the formation of the universe from small initial density perturbations to galaxies and clusters of galaxies observed today. The identification and analysis of bound objects, halos, is one of the most important steps in drawing useful physical information from simulations. In the advent of larger and larger simulations, a reliable and parallel halo finder, able to cope with the ever-increasing data files, is a must. In this work we present the freely available MPI parallel halo finder AHF. We provide a description of the algorithm and the strategy followed to handle large simulation data. We also describe the parameters a user may choose in order to influence the process of halo finding, as well as pointing out which parameters are crucial to ensure untainted results from the parallel approach. Furthermore, we demonstrate the ability of AHF to scale to high resolution simulations.