| Workshop 6 |
| Title of workshop: Cosmological HD & MHD simulations and data analysis techniques: solving challenges in Astronomy and Astrophysics" This workshop will be co-founder under a project (P.I. Surajit Paul) approved by National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). |
| Rationale: For astronomers and astrophysicists, sky is the laboratory. Unfortunately, it does not allow us to do controlled experiments or test individual theoretical models. But, computer simulations of astrophysical events allow us to do so and acts as true laboratory for astrophysicists. Simulation is also very important to understand temporal and spatial evolution of astrophysical structures which is otherwise almost impossible to study, especially for the large scale structures such as galaxies, clusters and 10s of Mpc scale cosmic filaments. Last but not least, unlike the observable sky that only allow us to study in 2 dimension, simulations allow us to see events in 3D and can help us to solve many outstanding problems that depends on the geometry of the objects. In short, simulations of large scale structures in the universe has now become an indispensable tool for the Astrophysics and Cosmology research. Various astrophysical codes are publicly available. Some of these codes are ENZO,GADGET, PENCIL etc. ENZO and GADGET can be used to model cosmological volumes of 100s of Mpc using both N-body (dark matter), and (magneto)-hydrodynamics (comprising of both magnetised and non-magnetised gas) to simulate galaxies, galaxy clusters as well as cosmic filaments and voids. In addition to cosmological simulations, non-cosmological codes like Pencil is extremely useful to probe astrophysical turbulence and cosmic magnetic fields in controlled settings, which allows for resolving the scales critical for magnetic field amplifications, which could be orders of magnitude smaller than the driving scale of turbulence. Most of the above mentioned codes offer the possibility to add other relevant physics modules such as star-formation and supernovae feedback, AGN feedback, sub-grid models of turbulence, cosmic ray transport, to name a few. These modules may be used in conjunction with one another depending on the requirements of the user. Though, it has been a very popular research field in most of the leading astrophysics institutes all over the world, in India it has not grown as a major research area yet. Mostly, because of unavailability of enough in-house computing facilities across the country. This is also true that it has not been promoted much by organising training events to motivate young researchers in this field. ASI annual meeting being the largest event in India that brings astronomers of all branches, will be the best suitable for organising such training/workshop. India has recently planned to make several world class supercomputers and HPCs spread all over the country under National Super Computing Mission (NSM). This is high time to grab this opportunity by creating a trained pool of researchers in this field. So, this workshop aims at promoting research in cosmological simulations among the new generation of astronomers/astrophysicists and make them equipped with the very essential tool for their research. Our main target groups are thus PhD students and postdocs, though a few young faculties can also me accommodated. Since, these are ready codes, with a bit of training, astronomers familiar with python scripting can also make use of simulated data for interpretation of their observations. |
| Plan: We plan to introduce the publicly available cosmological HD & MHD simulation codes (ENZO, Pencil Code, GADGET) through 2-3 lectures in the morning session. We will discuss about the basic theoretical models that has been implemented in these codes and will give a brief outline about possible astrophysics problems that these codes can deal with. Later, participants will be introduced to the type of data produced from the simulations and various post processing and visualisation techniques (yt-tools, IDL/GDL etc.). In the afternoon session, we will hold hands on sessions where we will teach data handling and post processing methods to produce the observable parameters that are useful for astronomers as well as astrophysicists and cosmologists. We will also try to help participants in using these techniques to solve their respective research problems in case they require such suggestions. Since, one day is not enough to include all aspects of cosmological simulations, our main focus in this workshop will be on post processing and data analysis part. We will provide simulated data to work on. We will organise a full workshop of 3-4 days on this topic in future, covering all the details i.e. starting from details of the publicly available codes, adding new modules to that, creating initial conditions, running cosmological simulations, understanding data structures, post processing data to analysing and visualising data and its interpretation. |
| Requirements: Every participants should bring their laptop with Linux/Unix operating system and enough data space or external hard drive (at least 250 GB). Before the workshop, we will help the selected participants to install required programs in their laptops (through online communication) to make sure that they come with required tools. |
| Expexted Participants: 25-30 |
| Details on Organisation: Organisers: Surajit Paul (SP Pune University), Sharanya Sur (IIA), Biswajit Panday (Visvabharati) and Prakash Sarkar (NIT-Jamshedpur) |