Team: 6
School: Sandia High
Area of Science: Astrophysics & Cosmology
Proposal: Historically, Newton's laws of motion and gravitation enabled understanding of the motions of the heavenly bodies. However, the inability to analytically solve for the motions of more than 2 bodies interacting under gravitation required extraordinarily exhaustive and rather inaccurate numerical approximation that scaled with O(n^2), with n being the number of objects. Simulating the dynamics of any system by hand was thus impractical beyond the scope of the 9 major bodies of the solar system. With the advent of computers and efficient computer algorithms, the large-scale evolution of the universe and the dynamic interaction between individual galaxies could be grasped. There were finally tools to verify our models of the early universe to a high degree of accuracy.
The computational complexity required to accurately simulate the gravitational interactions between thousands, millions, and even trillions of particles makes this an ideal task for supercomputers. The primary goal of the Simple Interactive N-Body Gravitation Simulator (SINGS) is to ease simulation creation and computation, while still generating scientifically useful data. The eventual implementation we hope to achieve will include multiple methods of numerical integration (including the Euler/Runge-Kutta methods), algorithms to reduce the amount of integration steps (such as the Barnes-Hut algorithm and Particle Mesh codes), utilization of multithreading (the main motivation for using supercomputers), a simple language for constructing simulation scenarios, differentiation of particle types (gas/dust and dark matter), and the ability to account for the effects of an expanding universe.
Team Members:
Sponsoring Teacher: Bradley Knockel