The Astrophysical Multipurpose Software Environment

TL;DR

AMUSE is an open-source Python framework that integrates various astrophysical simulation codes across multiple physical domains, enabling complex, distributed astrophysical modeling with standardized interfaces and data handling.

Contribution

This paper introduces AMUSE, a novel Python-based framework that standardizes and couples diverse astrophysical simulation codes for multi-physics, multi-scale modeling.

Findings

Supports codes for gravity, stellar evolution, hydrodynamics, radiative transfer

Facilitates distributed computation with MPI-based communication

Demonstrates application to complex astrophysical problems

Abstract

We present the open source Astrophysical Multi-purpose Software Environment (AMUSE, www.amusecode.org), a component library for performing astrophysical simulations involving different physical domains and scales. It couples existing codes within a Python framework based on a communication layer using MPI. The interfaces are standardized for each domain and their implementation based on MPI guarantees that the whole framework is well-suited for distributed computation. It includes facilities for unit handling and data storage. Currently it includes codes for gravitational dynamics, stellar evolution, hydrodynamics and radiative transfer. Within each domain the interfaces to the codes are as similar as possible. We describe the design and implementation of AMUSE, as well as the main components and community codes currently supported and we discuss the code interactions facilitated by the framework. Additionally, we demonstrate how AMUSE can be used to resolve complex astrophysical problems by presenting example applications.