The AREPO Public Code Release

Abstract

We introduce the public version of the cosmological magnetohydrodynamical moving-mesh simulation code A repo . This version contains a finite-volume magnetohydrodynamics algorithm on an unstructured, dynamic Voronoi tessellation coupled to a tree-particle-mesh algorithm for the Poisson equation either on a Newtonian or cosmologically expanding spacetime. Time integration is performed adopting local time step constraints for each cell individually, solving the fluxes only across active interfaces, and calculating gravitational forces only between active particles, using an operator-splitting approach. This allows simulations with high dynamic range to be performed efficiently. A repo is a massively distributed-memory parallel code, using the message passing interface (MPI) communication standard and employing a dynamical workload and memory balancing scheme to allow for optimal use of multi-node parallel computers. The employed parallelization algorithms of A repo are deterministic and produce binary-identical results when rerun on the same machine and with the same number of MPI ranks. A simple primordial cooling and star formation model is included as an example of sub-resolution models commonly used in simulations of galaxy formation. A repo also contains a suite of computationally inexpensive test problems, ranging from idealized tests for automated code verification to scaled-down versions of cosmological galaxy formation simulations, and is extensively documented in order to assist adoption of the code by new scientific users.