The Cosmic Code Comparison Project

Abstract

Current and upcoming cosmological observations allow us to probe structures on smaller and smaller scales, entering highly nonlinear regimes. In order to obtain theoretical predictions in these regimes, large cosmological simulations have to be carried out. The promised high accuracy from observations make the simulation task very demanding: the simulations have to be at least as accurate as the observations. This requirement can only be fulfilled by carrying out an extensive code validation program. The first step of such a program is the comparison of different cosmology codes including gravitation interactions only. In this paper we extend a recently carried out code comparison project to include five more simulation codes. We restrict our analysis to a small cosmological volume which allows us to investigate properties of halos. For the matter power spectrum and the mass function, the previous results hold, with the codes agreeing at the 10% level over wide dynamic ranges. We extend our analysis to the comparison of halo profiles and investigate the halo count as a function of local density. We introduce and discuss ParaView as a flexible analysis tool for cosmological simulations, the use of which immensely simplifies the code comparison task.

28 pages, 14 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Effects of Baryons and Dissipation on the Matter Power Spectrum
• The Halo Mass Function: High-Redshift Evolution and Universality
• Out-of-Core Hydrodynamic Simulations for Cosmological Applications

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• Imprint of Inhomogeneous Hydrogen Reionization on the Temperature Distribution of the Intergalactic Medium
• Perturbation Theory Reloaded II: Non-linear Bias, Baryon Acoustic Oscillations and Millennium Simulation In Real Space
• The Structure of Halos: Implications for Group and Cluster Cosmology
• Cross-correlation Weak Lensing of SDSS Galaxy Clusters III: Mass-to-light Ratios
• Simulating Subhalos at High Redshift: Merger Rates, Counts, and Types
• SPHRAY: A Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Ray Tracer for Radiative Transfer
• Towards quantitative control on discreteness error in the non-linear regime of cosmological N body simulations
• Multiple Uncertainties in Time-Variant Cosmological Particle Data
• Issues in joint SZ and optical cluster finding
• Great Surveys of the Universe
• Visualization of Cosmological Particle-Based Datasets