GALAXY package for N-body simulation

TL;DR

The GALAXY package is a highly efficient, publicly available N-body simulation software for collisionless stellar systems, offering multiple methods and analysis tools, with significant speed advantages for specific applications.

Contribution

This paper introduces the GALAXY software package, providing a comprehensive, efficient tool for N-body simulations with multiple gravitational calculation methods and analysis features.

Findings

Particle-mesh methods are 50-200 times faster than tree codes for certain applications.

The package includes eleven methods for gravitational acceleration computation.

It offers sophisticated setup and analysis tools for stellar system simulations.

Abstract

This posting announces public availability of the GALAXY software package developed by the author over the past 40 years. It is a highly efficient code for the evolution of (almost) isolated, collisionless stellar systems, both disk-like and ellipsoidal. In addition to the N-body code galaxy, which offers eleven different methods to compute the gravitational accelerations, the package also includes sophisticated set-up and analysis software. This paper gives an outline of the contents of the package and provides links to the source code and a comprehensive on-line manual. While not as versatile as tree codes, the particle-mesh methods in this package are shown, for certain restricted applications, to be between 50 and 200 times faster than a widely-used tree code.