Six Dimensional Streaming Algorithm for Cluster Finding in N-Body Simulations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a six-dimensional streaming algorithm that incorporates velocity information to improve cluster detection in N-body simulations, enabling identification of overlapping halos that positional methods miss.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel six-dimensional streaming algorithm that includes velocity data, enhancing cluster detection accuracy in cosmological N-body simulations.

Findings

Successfully detects overlapping halos in simulations

Outperforms previous positional-only methods

Identifies halos indistinguishable in positional space

Abstract

Cosmological N-body simulations are crucial for understanding how the Universe evolves. Studying large-scale distributions of matter in these simulations and comparing them to observations usually involves detecting dense clusters of particles called "halos,'' which are gravitationally bound and expected to form galaxies. However, traditional cluster finders are computationally expensive and use massive amounts of memory. Recent work by Liu et al (Liu et al. (2015)) showed the connection between cluster detection and memory-efficient streaming algorithms and presented a halo finder based on heavy hitter algorithm. Later, Ivkin et al. (Ivkin et al. (2018)) improved the scalability of suggested streaming halo finder with efficient GPU implementation. Both works map particles' positions onto a discrete grid, and therefore lose the rest of the information, such as their velocities. Therefore, two halos travelling through each other are indistinguishable in positional space, while the velocity distribution of those halos can help to identify this process which is worth further studying. In this project we analyze data from the Millennium Simulation Project (Springel et al. (2005)) to motivate the inclusion of the velocity into streaming method we introduce. We then demonstrate a use of suggested method, which allows one to find the same halos as before, while also detecting those which were indistinguishable in prior methods.