REBOUND: An open-source multi-purpose N-body code for collisional dynamics

By H. Rein, Shangfei Liu. 2011

863 citations recorded by the source corpus.

REBOUND is a new multi-purpose N-body code which is freely available under an open-source license. It was designed for collisional dynamics such as planetary rings but can also solve the classical N-body problem. It is highly modular and can be customized easily to work on a wide variety of different problems in astrophysics and beyond. REBOUND comes with three symplectic integrators: leap-frog, the symplectic epicycle integrator (SEI) and a Wisdom-Holman mapping (WH). It supports open, periodic and shearing-sheet boundary conditions. REBOUND can use a Barnes-Hut tree to calculate both self-gravity and collisions. These modules are fully parallelized with MPI as well as OpenMP. The former makes use of a static domain decomposition and a distributed essential tree. Two new collision detection modules based on a plane-sweep algorithm are also implemented. The performance of the plane-sweep algorithm is superior to a tree code for simulations in which one dimension is much longer than the other two and in simulations which are quasi-two dimensional with less than one million particles. In this work, we discuss the different algorithms implemented in REBOUND, the philosophy behind the code's structure as well as implementation specific details of the different modules. We present results of accuracy and scaling tests which show that the code can run efficiently on both desktop machines and large computing clusters.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5240c4a18da2b6dcae3fbfa633c01bee1670d0a0

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Aerospace Engineering

1. D. Tamayo
2. S. Tremaine
3. D. Spiegel
4. K. Silsbee
5. H. Rein

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Nuno C. Santos
2. M. Mayor
3. F. Bouchy
4. C. Lovis
5. F. Pepe
6. X. Delfosse
7. X. Bonfils
8. S. Tremaine

Citations in the corpus

• WHFAST: a fast and unbiased implementation of a symplectic Wisdom-Holman integrator for long-term gravitational simulations (2015, methodology): “It is based on the SWIFTER-WHM integrator in SWIFTER but ported to C and available in the REBOUND (Rein & Liu 2012) package.”
• Lidov–Kozai Cycles with Gravitational Radiation: Merging Black Holes in Isolated Triple Systems (2016, methodology): “In order to get a more accurate estimate of the fraction of triple systems that lead to merger, we ran three-body simulations using the Rebound package (Rein & Liu 2012) with the IAS15 integrator (Rein & Spiegel 2015).”
• ias15: a fast, adaptive, high-order integrator for gravitational dynamics, accurate to machine precision over a billion orbits (2014, methodology): “It is worth pointing out that several integrators that we tested, including the RADAU integrator (with either the MERCURY or REBOUND implementation) fail completely in this test problem if the system is simply rescaled.”
• Characterization of the K2-18 multi-planetary system with HARPS: A habitable zone super-Earth and discovery of a second, warm super-Earth on a non-coplanar orbit (2017, methodology): “The system is then integrated forward in time from the epoch of the first K2 photometric observation (BJD = 2 456 810.26222) for 106 yr using the Wisdom-Holman symplectic integrator WHFast (Rein & Tamayo 2015) implemented in the open-source REBOUND Nbody package (Rein & Liu 2012).”