Astro 528 Class Project

GitHub Actions :

Project Goals:

• Create an N-body simulator of the solar system
• Utilize GPU acceleration

Overview

This project takes data from the NASA JPL Horizons Database on Solar System objects and/or can create a uniform distribution of identical particles in a given spherical shell. The code calculates the acceleration from the position, velocity, and masses of the objects. This is then integrated through time using the Euler or Verlet algorithms.

File Breakdown

• accel.jl has code to calculate the acceleration between bodies in the simulation
• bodies.jl contains the body struct, a cookie cutter for each mass in the system
• dictionaries.jl creates a dictionary containing all bodies in the simulation
• Euler_mainv2.jl contains the code to perform an Euler integration on the bodies in the simulation
• Eulerv2.jl performs ONE integration step for ONE body
• get_planet_data.jl obtains data on any body stored in the NASA Horizons database
• particles.jl creates a uniform distribution of identical particles in a spherical shell
• save.jl saves the position history of each body into jld2 files
• Verlet_main.jl performs Verlet integration on all bodies in the simulation

Quick Use

• Open a julia terminal
• Create a list of names of the NASA Horizons Sun/Planets you want to include
• Run download_planet_data_from_list() from the get_planet_data.jl to download data from horizons
• Run either Verlet_main() or Euler_main() to perform a Verlet or Euler integration

Class Project Schedule

• Project proposal (due Sept 6)
• Serial version of code (due Oct 2)
• Peer code review (due Oct 9)
• Parallel version of code (multi-core) (due Oct 30)
• Second parallel version of code (distributed-memory/GPU/cloud) (due Nov 13)
• Completed code, documentation, tests, packaging (optional) & reflection (due Nov 29)
• Class presentations (Nov 27 - Dec 6, detailed schedule )