GANDALF - Graphical Astrophysics code for N-body Dynamics And Lagrangian Fluids

TL;DR

GANDALF is an open-source, object-oriented C++ code for astrophysical simulations involving hydrodynamics and N-body dynamics, supporting various schemes and parallel computing, aimed at studying star and planet formation.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible, modular, and parallelized astrophysics simulation code with multiple physics schemes and Python integration, facilitating research in star and planet formation.

Findings

Successfully implemented multiple physics schemes.

Demonstrated good parallel performance.

Code is openly available for community use.

Abstract

GANDALF is a new hydrodynamics and N-body dynamics code designed for investigating planet formation, star formation and star cluster problems. GANDALF is written in C++, parallelised with both OpenMP and MPI and contains a python library for analysis and visualisation. The code has been written with a fully object-oriented approach to easily allow user-defined implementations of physics modules or other algorithms. The code currently contains implementations of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics, Meshless Finite-Volume and collisional N-body schemes, but can easily be adapted to include additional particle schemes. We present in this paper the details of its implementation, results from the test suite, serial and parallel performance results and discuss the planned future development. The code is freely available as an open source project on the code-hosting website github at https://github.com/gandalfcode/gandalf and is available under the GPLv2 license.