The AGORA High-resolution Galaxy Simulations Comparison Project
Abstract
We introduce the Assembling Galaxies Of Resolved Anatomy (AGORA) project, a comprehensive numerical study of well-resolved galaxies within the ΛCDM cosmology. Cosmological hydrodynamic simulations with force resolutions of ~100 proper pc or better will be run with a variety of code platforms to follow the hierarchical growth, star formation history, morphological transformation, and the cycle of baryons in and out of eight galaxies with halo masses M_(vir) ≃ 10^(10), 10^(11), 10^(12), and 10^(13) M_☉ at z = 0 and two different ("violent" and "quiescent") assembly histories. The numerical techniques and implementations used in this project include the smoothed particle hydrodynamics codes GADGET and GASOLINE, and the adaptive mesh refinement codes ART, ENZO, and RAMSES. The codes share common initial conditions and common astrophysics packages including UV background, metal-dependent radiative cooling, metal and energy yields of supernovae, and stellar initial mass function. These are described in detail in the present paper. Subgrid star formation and feedback prescriptions will be tuned to provide a realistic interstellar and circumgalactic medium using a non-cosmological disk galaxy simulation. Cosmological runs will be systematically compared with each other using a common analysis toolkit and validated against observations to verify that the solutions are robust—i.e., that the astrophysical assumptions are responsible for any success, rather than artifacts of particular implementations. The goals of the AGORA project are, broadly speaking, to raise the realism and predictive power of galaxy simulations and the understanding of the feedback processes that regulate galaxy "metabolism." The initial conditions for the AGORA galaxies as well as simulation outputs at various epochs will be made publicly available to the community. The proof-of-concept dark-matter-only test of the formation of a galactic halo with a z = 0 mass of M_(vir) ≃ 1.7 × 10^(11) M_☉ by nine different versions of the participating codes is also presented to validate the infrastructure of the project.
Additional Information
© 2014 American Astronomical Society. Received 2013 August 12; accepted 2013 November 26; published 2013 December 24. The authors of this article thank members of the AGORA collaboration who are not on the author list but have provided helpful suggestions on the early version of the paper, including Peter Behroozi, Romeel Davé, Michele Fumagalli, Fabio Governato, and Ramin Skibba. We thank Volker Springel for private communications on the contents of Section 5.2.3 and for providing the original version of Gadget-3. We thank Joachim Stadel and Doug Potter for private communications on the contents of Section 5.2.4 and providing the original version of Pkdgrav-2. We gratefully acknowledge the financial and logistical support from the University of California High-Performance AstroComputing Center (UC-HiPACC) during the two AGORA workshops held at the University of California Santa Cruz in 2012 and 2013. Ji-hoon Kim and Mark R. Krumholz acknowledge support from NSF through grant AST-0955300, NASA through grant NNX13AB84G, and a Chandra X-Ray Observatory grant GO2-13162A. Ji-hoon Kim is grateful for the additional support from the UC-HiPACC. He is also is grateful for the support from Stuart Marshall and the computational team at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory during the usage of the Orange cluster for the generation and testing of the AGORA initial conditions and for the support from Shawfeng Dong and the computational team at the University of California Santa Cruz during the usage of the Hyades cluster for the analysis of the AGORA proof-of-concept runs. Avishai Dekel and Adi Zolotov acknowledge support from ISF grant 24/12, by GIF grant G-1052-104.7/2009, a DIP grant, NSF grant AST-1010033, and from the I-CORE Program of the PBC and the ISF grant 1829/12. Nathan J. Goldbaum acknowledges support from NSF grant AST-0955300 and the Graduate Research Fellowship Program. Oliver Hahn acknowledges support from the Swiss National Science Foundation through the Ambizione Fellowship. Samuel N. Leitner acknowledges support by an Astronomy Center for Theory and Computation Prize Fellowship at the University of Maryland. Piero Madau acknowledges support from NSF through grants OIA-1124453 and AST-1229745. Kentaro Nagamine and Keita Todoroki's computing time was provided by XSEDE allocation TG-AST070038N and they utilized the Texas Advanced Computing Center's Lonestar. XSEDE is supported by NSF grant OCI-1053575. Jose Oñorbe acknowledges the financial support from the Fulbright/MICINN Program and NASA grant NNX09AG01G. His computing time was provided by XSEDE allocation TG-AST110035. Brian W. O'Shea and Britton D. Smith acknowledge support from the LANL Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics, NASA through grants NNX09AD80G and NNX12AC98G, and by NSF through grants AST-0908819, PHY-0941373, and PHY-0822648. Their computing time was provided by XSEDE allocations TG-AST090040 and TG-AST120009. Brian W. O'Shea's work was supported in part by the NSF through grant PHYS-1066293 and the hospitality of the Aspen Center for Physics. Joel R. Primack acknowledges support from NSF grant AST-1010033. Thomas Quinn acknowledges support from NSF grant AST-0908499. Justin I. Read acknowledges support from SNF grant PP00P2_128540/1. Douglas H. Rudd acknowledges support from NSF grant OCI-0904484, the Research Computing Center and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago through NSF grant PHY-1125897 and an endowment from the Kavli Foundation and its founder Fred Kavli. His work made use of computing facilities provided by the Research Computing Center at the University of Chicago, the Yale University Faculty of Arts and Sciences High Performance Computing Center, and the Joint Fermilab-KICP Supercomputing Cluster, supported by grants from Fermilab, Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, and the University of Chicago. Romain Teyssier and Oliver Hahn's Ramses simulations were performed on the Cray XE6 cluster Monte Rosa at CSCS, Lugano, Switzerland. Matthew J. Turk acknowledges support by the NSF CI TraCS Fellowship award OCI-1048505. John H. Wise acknowledges support from NSF grant AST-1211626.Attached Files
Published - 0067-0049_210_1_14.pdf
Submitted - 1308.2669v5.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 44301
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20140313-103344090
- University of California High-Performance AstroComputing Center (UC-HiPACC)
- AST-0955300
- NSF
- NNX13AB84G
- NASA
- GO2-13162A
- Chandra X-Ray Observatory
- Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
- University of California Santa Cruz
- 24/12
- Israel Science Foundation
- G-1052-104.7/2009
- GIF
- DIP
- AST-1010033
- NSF
- PBC I-CORE Program
- 1829/12
- Israel Science Foundation
- AST-0955300
- NSF
- NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
- Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
- University of Maryland Astronomy Center for Theory and Computation Prize Fellowship
- OIA-1124453
- NSF
- AST-1229745
- NSF
- TG-AST070038N
- NSF
- OCI-1053575
- NSF
- Fulbright/MICINN Program
- NNX09AG01G
- NASA
- TG-AST110035
- NSF
- Los Alamos National Laboratory
- NNX09AD80G
- NASA
- NNX12AC98G
- NASA
- AST-0908819
- NSF
- PHY-0941373
- NSF
- PHY-0822648
- NSF
- TG-AST090040
- NSF
- TG-AST120009
- NSF
- PHYS-1066293
- NSF
- AST-1010033
- NSF
- AST-0908499
- NSF
- PP00P2_128540/1
- SNF
- OCI-0904484
- NSF
- PHY-1125897
- NSF
- Kavli Foundation
- Fermilab
- Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
- University of Chicago
- OCI-1048505
- NSF
- AST-1211626
- NSF
- Created
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2014-03-13Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field