Home - sharpc42/CGM-theory-sims GitHub Wiki
Welcome to the CGM-theory-sims wiki! This is a work in progress as both the wiki and the code files are updated to the project's current status. Until this message says otherwise, any files in the repo are incomplete, no longer relevant, etc., if you should so choose to clone them.
Furthermore, for the time being, while it would be nice to have this be more general, the wiki for now is tailored the UW supercomputer Hyak on which the code has so far been tested.
The CGM Virtual Environment (CVE) is an interface for the Athena++ magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) astrophysics simulation code (Stone et al., 2020, arXiv:2005.06651) as well as custom plotting and visualization functions for the simulation output. It is designed to facilitate easy simulation a typical circumgalactic medium (CGM) of a spiral galaxy: an environment of complicated, correlated phases which is generally believed to fuel continuous, recycled star formation leading to the formation of planets and life. The details constituting a prospective environment, as well as analysis and rendering, can be simply tailored as textual and numeric parameters provided by the user using a custom Athena++ input file.
The CVE was envisioned to facilitate ease of use of MHD simulations by undergraduate astronomy students in particular, though also by extension research professionals of any experience. Theory work in astronomy is difficult to do at an early academic stage due to the large amounts of lower level code in languages like C/C++ instead of the Python most frequently taught, if it is at all at that point. While such skillsets may eventually be needed anyway, to have such an early high barrier to entry restricts the ability of interested undergraduate students to even engage with and learn basic mindsets, methodology, and tactics of technical theory work. The CVE aims to lower that barrier for this particular area of investigation by reducing the C++ or even Python knowledge required to begin engaging with astrophysical simulations.