requirements.md - spzwart/AMUSE-Tutorial GitHub Wiki

Requirements

This course is unsuitable for students with little or no affinity for programming or astrophysics. To successfully finish this course, you will need:

• A BSc in astronomy or astrophysics
• Basic knowledge of the Python programming language

Hardware:

You will require some software to follow the course. Ideally, you own a desktop or laptop computer, but in principle, all calculations can be performed with a simple university student account. The assignments are tuned explicitly for small computers and hardly require more than a few minutes (or a few hours for the more challenging assignments) of computing time. In case of more demanding calculations, we will make a 64-core workstation and the ALICE Tier-2 supercomputer available. For seriously challenging tasks, we will use the national supercomputer Snellius (this requires the writing of a proposal)

Software:

• Operating system:
  You will be running the course software on a LINUX machine. It is not recommended to use any commercial operating system (ever). The software works on any LINUX distro, but we have tested the assignments using Ubuntu Linux version 22.04 LTS

• Plotting package
  Most plotting is done with the matplotlib or seaborn plotting packages, but you can use other packages.

• The Astrophysics Multipurpose Software Environment
  We will be using AMUSE.

Please ensure all the required software is installed correctly on your computer before the start of the course.