Simulating the formation of large-scale cosmic structure with particle-grid methods

Abstract

Numerical simulations are an essential component of the study of the nonlinear growth and evolution of cosmic structures. After a brief description of the standard cosmological model, this work sets up the framework within which we can study the gravitational growth of density fluctuations in the universe and motivates the use of particle methods for the numerical modelling of these processes. The second part contains a description of the numerical techniques used to solve Poisson's equation for a very large number of self-gravitating particles in the cosmological context. The work concentrates on the common grid-based methods that are widely used for the largest cosmological simulations, and discusses the migration of these algorithms to parallel computer architectures.