Abstract

Efficient computation of local densities using galaxy pairs from the Millennium simulation

Wilfred Blight (Trent University)

The development and formation of a galaxy is affected by the number density of galaxies in the local surrounding environment. To assist in the study and development of correlations between galaxy class and local galaxy density we present a parallel designed application that works with a dataset from the Millennium Run simulation. The simulation contains millions of galaxies distributed throughout a cube of space that is 500 megaparsecs in size. The application measures the local number density on a scale specified by the user. The scale has a wide range from kiloparsecs to megaparsecs. To reduce the number of calculations the application reduces the large cube represented by the dataset into smaller cubes based on the specified scale. The algorithm reduces the complexity of the problem from an O(n^2 ) problem to one that approaches O(n log n).

Mode of presentation: poster