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The Nbody Library

The goal of N-body algorithms is to simulate the motion of n particles through space where each particle is effected by forces (e.g. gravitational or electro-magnetic) of the other particles. Tree-based methods can reduce the cost of each step from O(n2), which consider all interactions, to O(n lg n) or even O(n). The methods, however, can be very complicated. Furthermore, many variants have been suggested, and it is as yet unclear which supply the best accuracy/runtime tradeoffs and under what conditions. We are in the process of defining a clean interface that allows us to easily compare the different algorithms, and plug and play with the components of the algorithms.


Acknowledgements

The PSCICO project is supported by NSF under the title "Advanced Languages for Scientific Computation Environments" as part of the Experimental Software Systems program within CISE. The grant number is 9706572.


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