From Nbody1 to Nbody7: the Growth of Sverres Industry

TL;DR

This paper reviews the historical growth and recent developments in Sverre Aarseth's N-body simulation codes, highlighting technological advances and the expanding community and industry around these tools.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution of N-body simulation codes from NBODY1 to NBODY7, emphasizing technological progress and community engagement.

Findings

Significant technological improvements in N-body codes over decades.

Growing number of publications using and developing these codes.

Emergence of new competing N-body simulation codes.

Abstract

From NBODY1 to NBODY6 : The Growth of an Industry is the title of a 1999 invited review by Sverre Aarseth, for Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (PASP). I took this as an inspiration for the title of this paper; it describes how Sverres NBODY Industry has further grown since 90s of the previous century, and how it is further flourishing and hopefully developing, in his spirit, even after the sad news of his passing away reached us. My contact and friendship with Sverre started a few decades ago being sent to Cambridge to learn NBODY5, counting input parameters, and learning about the fact that even a sophisticated code (which had already at that time quite a history) requires permanent maintenance and bug fixes. Managed by Sverre, who relentlessly ran his code and responded to the widely spread crowd of customer colleagues. There has been a phase of massive and fast development and improvements due to vectorization, parallelization, GRAPE and GPU acceleration, and Sverre has been always on top of it if not ahead, but also fully adopting ideas of collaborators, once they tested well. NBODY6++GPU and NBODY7 entered the scene, and also recent new competitors, such as PETAR or BIFROST . We all have learnt a lot from Sverre, and strive to continue in his open-minded spirit, for open source and exchange. A striking evidence for the further growth of the industry is the number of papers here (and two of them follow in this session, but also in other sessions) using and further developing the aforementioned codes, as well as the occurrence of new and competing codes, which keep the field alive.