iCosmo is a software package to perform interactive cosmological calculations for the low redshift universe. The computation of distance measures, the matter power spectrum, and the growth factor is supported for any values of the cosmological parameters. It also performs the computation of observables for several cosmological probes such as weak gravitational lensing, baryon acoustic oscillations and supernovae. The associated errors for these observables can be derived for customised surveys, or for pre-set values corresponding to current or planned instruments. The code also allows for the calculation of cosmological forecasts with Fisher matrices which can be manipulated to combine different surveys and cosmological probes. The code is written in the IDL language and thus benefits from the convenient interactive features and scientific library available in this language. iCosmo can also be used as an engine to perform cosmological calculations in batch mode, and forms a convenient evolutive platform for the development of further cosmological modules. With its extensive documentation, it may also serve as a useful resource for teaching and for newcomers in the field of cosmology.

Stellar Locus Regression (SLR) is a simple way to calibrate colors at the 1-2% level, and magnitudes at the sub-5% level as limited by 2MASS, without the traditional use of standard stars. With SLR, stars in any field are "standards." This is an entirely new way to calibrate photometry. SLR exploits the simple fact that most stars lie along a well defined line in color-color space called the stellar locus. Cross-match point-sources in flattened images taken through different passbands and plot up all color vs color combinations, and you will see the stellar locus with little effort. SLR calibrates colors by fitting these colors to a standard line. Cross-match with 2MASS on top of that, and SLR will deliver calibrated magnitudes as well.

Montage is an open source code toolkit for assembling Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) images into custom mosaics. It runs on all common Linux/Unix platforms, on desktops, clusters and computational grids, and supports all World Coordinate System (WCS) projections and common coordinate systems. Montage preserves spatial and calibration fidelity of input images, processes 40 million pixels in up to 32 minutes on 128 nodes on a Linux cluster, and provides independent engines for analyzing the geometry of images on the sky, re-projecting images, rectifying background emission to a common level, and co-adding images. It offers convenient tools for managing and manipulating large image files.

The Fast Chi-Squared Algorithm is a fast, powerful technique for detecting periodicity. It was developed for analyzing variable stars, but is applicable to many of the other applications where the Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs) or other periodograms (such as Lomb-Scargle) are currently used. The Fast Chi-squared technique takes a data set (e.g. the brightness of a star measured at many different times during a series of observations) and finds the periodic function that has the best frequency and shape (to an arbitrary number of harmonics) to fit the data. Among its advantages are:

• Statistical efficiency: all of the data are used, weighted by their individual error bars, giving a result with a significance calibrated in well-understood Chi-squared statistics.
• Sensitivity to harmonic content: many conventional techniques look only at the significance (or the amplitude) of the fundamental sinusoid and discard the power of the higher harmonics.
• Insensitivity to the sample timing: you won't find a period of 24 hours just because you take your observations at night. You do not need to window your data.
• The frequency search is gridded more tightly than the traditional "integer number of cycles over the span of observations", eliminating power loss from peaks that fall between the grid points.
• Computational speed: The complexity of the algorithm is O(NlogN), where N is the number of frequencies searched, due to its use of the FFT.

We present a set of low resolution empirical SED templates for AGNs and galaxies in the wavelength range from 0.03 to 30 microns based on the multi-wavelength photometric observations of the NOAO Deep-Wide Field Survey Bootes field and the spectroscopic observations of the AGN and Galaxy Evolution Survey. Our training sample is comprised of 14448 galaxies in the redshift range 0<~z<~1 and 5347 likely AGNs in the range 0<~z<~5.58. We use our templates to determine photometric redshifts for galaxies and AGNs. While they are relatively accurate for galaxies, their accuracies for AGNs are a strong function of the luminosity ratio between the AGN and galaxy components. Somewhat surprisingly, the relative luminosities of the AGN and its host are well determined even when the photometric redshift is significantly in error. We also use our templates to study the mid-IR AGN selection criteria developed by Stern et al.(2005) and Lacy et al.(2004). We find that the Stern et al.(2005) criteria suffers from significant incompleteness when there is a strong host galaxy component and at z =~ 4.5, when the broad Halpha emission line is redshifted into the [3.6] band, but that it is little contaminated by low and intermediate redshift galaxies. The Lacy et al.(2004) criterion is not affected by incompleteness at z =~ 4.5 and is somewhat less affected by strong galaxy host components, but is heavily contaminated by low redshift star forming galaxies. Finally, we use our templates to predict the color-color distribution of sources in the upcoming WISE mission and define a color criterion to select AGNs analogous to those developed for IRAC photometry. We estimate that in between 640,000 and 1,700,000 AGNs will be identified by these criteria, but will have serious completeness problems for z >~ 3.4.

We consider the problem of fitting a parametric model to time-series data that are afflicted by correlated noise. The noise is represented by a sum of two stationary Gaussian processes: one that is uncorrelated in time, and another that has a power spectral density varying as $1/f^gamma$. We present an accurate and fast [O(N)] algorithm for parameter estimation based on computing the likelihood in a wavelet basis. The method is illustrated and tested using simulated time-series photometry of exoplanetary transits, with particular attention to estimating the midtransit time. We compare our method to two other methods that have been used in the literature, the time-averaging method and the residual-permutation method. For noise processes that obey our assumptions, the algorithm presented here gives more accurate results for midtransit times and truer estimates of their uncertainties.

Complicated cosmic string loops will fragment until they reach simple, non-intersecting ("stable") configurations. Through extensive numerical study, these attractor loop shapes are characterized including their length, velocity, kink, and cusp distributions. An initial loop containing $M$ harmonic modes will, on average, split into 3M stable loops. These stable loops are approximately described by the degenerate kinky loop, which is planar and rectangular, independently of the number of modes on the initial loop. This is confirmed by an analytic construction of a stable family of perturbed degenerate kinky loops. The average stable loop is also found to have a 40% chance of containing a cusp. This new analytic scheme explicitly solves the string constraint equations.

The analysis of weak lensing data requires to account for missing data such as masking out of bright stars. To date, the majority of lensing analyses uses the two point-statistics of the cosmic shear field. These can either be studied directly using the two-point correlation function, or in Fourier space, using the power spectrum. The two-point correlation function is unbiased by missing data but its direct calculation will soon become a burden with the exponential growth of astronomical data sets. The power spectrum is fast to estimate but a mask correction should be estimated. Other statistics can be used but these are strongly sensitive to missing data. The solution that is proposed by FASTLens is to properly fill-in the gaps with only NlogN operations, leading to a complete weak lensing mass map from which one can compute straight forwardly and with a very good accuracy any kind of statistics like power spectrum or bispectrum.

This code, which requires HEALPix 2.x (ascl:1107.018), allows you to generate power spectrum estimators from WMAP 5-year maps and generate hybrid cross- and auto- power spectrum and covariance from general foreground-cleaned maps. In addition, it allows you to simulate combined maps or combinations of maps for individual detectors and do MPI spherical transforms of arrays of maps, calculate coupling matrices etc. The code includes all of LensPix (ascl:1102.025), the MPI framework used for doing spherical transforms (based on HealPix).

FSPS is a flexible SPS package that allows the user to compute simple stellar populations (SSPs) for a range of IMFs and metallicities, and for a variety of assumptions regarding the morphology of the horizontal branch, the blue straggler population, the post--AGB phase, and the location in the HR diagram of the TP-AGB phase. From these SSPs the user may then generate composite stellar populations (CSPs) for a variety of star formation histories (SFHs) and dust attenuation prescriptions. Outputs include the "observed" spectra and magnitudes of the SSPs and CSPs at arbitrary redshift. In addition to these fortran routines, several IDL routines are provided that allow easy manipulation of the output. FSPS was designed with the intention that the user would make full use of the provided fortran routines. However, the full FSPS package is quite large, and requires some time for the user to become familiar with all of the options and syntax. Some users may only need SSPs for a range of metallicities and IMFs. For such users, standard SSP sets for several IMFs, evolutionary tracks, and spectral libraries are available here.

MAESTRO, a low Mach number stellar hydrodynamics code, simulates long-time, low-speed flows that would be prohibitively expensive to model using traditional compressible codes. MAESTRO is based on an equation set derived using low Mach number asymptotics; this equation set does not explicitly track acoustic waves and thus allows a significant increase in the time step. MAESTRO is suitable for two- and three-dimensional local atmospheric flows as well as three-dimensional full-star flows, and adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) has been incorporated into the code. The expansion of the base state for full-star flows using a novel mapping technique between the one-dimensional base state and the Cartesian grid is also available.

NOTE: MAESTRO is no longer being actively developed. Users should switch to MAESTROeX (ascl:1908.019) to take advantage of the latest capabilities.

PLUTO is a modular Godunov-type code intended mainly for astrophysical applications and high Mach number flows in multiple spatial dimensions. The code embeds different hydrodynamic modules and multiple algorithms to solve the equations describing Newtonian, relativistic, MHD, or relativistic MHD fluids in Cartesian or curvilinear coordinates. PLUTO is entirely written in the C programming language and can run on either single processor machines or large parallel clusters through the MPI library. A simple user-interface based on the Python scripting language is available to setup a physical problem in a quick and self-explanatory way. Computations may be carried on either static or adaptive (structured) grids, the latter functionality being provided through the Chombo adaptive mesh refinement library.

This program measures line-strength indices in fully calibrated FITS spectra. By "fully calibrated" one should understand wavelength and relative flux-calibrated data. Note that the different types of line-strength indices that can be measured with indexf (see below) do not require absolute flux calibration. If even a relative flux-calibration is absent (or deficient), the derived indices should be transformed to an appropriate spectrophotometric system. The program can also compute index errors resulting from the propagation of random errors (e.g. photon statistics, read-out noise). This option is only available if the user provides the error spectrum as an additional input FITS file to indexf. The error spectrum must contain the unbiased standard deviation (and not the variance!) for each pixel of the data spectrum. In addition, indexf also estimates the effect of errors on radial velocity. For this purpose, the program performs Monte Carlo simulations by measuring each index using randomly drawn radial velocities (following a Gaussian distribution of a given standard deviation). If no error file is employed, the program can perform numerical simulations with synthetic error spectra, the latter generated from the original data spectra and assuming randomly generated S/N ratios.

ISW and Weak Lensing Likelihood code is the likelihood code that calculates the likelihood of Integrated Sachs Wolfe and Weak Lensing of Cosmic Microwave Background using the WMAP 3year CMB maps with mass tracers such as 2MASS (2-Micron All Sky Survey), SDSS LRG (Sloan Digital Sky Survey Luminous Red Galaxies), SDSS QSOs (Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasars) and NVSS (NRAO VLA All Sky Survey) radio sources. The details of the analysis (*thus the likelihood code) can be understood by reading the papers ISW paper and Weak lensing paper. The code does brute force theoretical matter power spectrum and calculations with CAMB. See the paper for an introduction, descriptions, and typical results from some pre-WMAP data. The code is designed to be integrated into CosmoMC. For further information concerning the integration, see Code Modification for integration into COSMOMC.

Octgrav is a very fast tree-code which runs on massively parallel Graphical Processing Units (GPU) with NVIDIA CUDA architecture. The algorithms are based on parallel-scan and sort methods. The tree-construction and calculation of multipole moments is carried out on the host CPU, while the force calculation which consists of tree walks and evaluation of interaction list is carried out on the GPU. In this way, a sustained performance of about 100GFLOP/s and data transfer rates of about 50GB/s is achieved. It takes about a second to compute forces on a million particles with an opening angle of $ heta approx 0.5$.

To test the performance and feasibility, we implemented the algorithms in CUDA in the form of a gravitational tree-code which completely runs on the GPU. The tree construction and traverse algorithms are portable to many-core devices which have support for CUDA or OpenCL programming languages. The gravitational tree-code outperforms tuned CPU code during the tree-construction and shows a performance improvement of more than a factor 20 overall, resulting in a processing rate of more than 2.8 million particles per second.

The code has a convenient user interface and is freely available for use.

We present a new method for detecting the missing baryons by generating a template for the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect. The template is computed from the product of a reconstructed velocity field with a galaxy field. We provide maps of such templates constructed from SDSS Data Release 7 spectroscopic data (SDSS VAGC sample) along side with their expected two point correlation functions with CMB temperature anisotropies. Codes of generating such coefficients of the two point correlation function are also released to provide users of the gas-momentum map a way to change the parameters such as cosmological parameters, reionization history, ionization parameters, etc.

LensPerfect is a new approach to the massmap reconstruction of strong gravitational lenses. Conventional methods iterate over possible lens models which reproduce the observed multiple image positions well but not exactly. LensPerfect only produces solutions which fit all of the data exactly. Magnifications and shears of the multiple images can also be perfectly constrained to match observations.

NEMO is an extendible Stellar Dynamics Toolbox, following an Open-Source Software model. It has various programs to create, integrate, analyze and visualize N-body and SPH like systems, following the pipe and filter architecture. In addition there are various tools to operate on images, tables and orbits, including FITS files to export/import to/from other astronomical data reduction packages. A large growing fraction of NEMO has been contributed by a growing list of authors. The source code consist of a little over 4000 files and a little under 1,000,000 lines of code and documentation, mostly C, and some C++ and Fortran. NEMO development started in 1986 in Princeton (USA) by Barnes, Hut and Teuben. See also ZENO (ascl:1102.027) for the version that Barnes maintains.

EAZY, Easy and Accurate Zphot from Yale, determines photometric redshifts. The program is optimized for cases where spectroscopic redshifts are not available, or only available for a biased subset of the galaxies. The code combines features from various existing codes: it can fit linear combinations of templates, it includes optional flux- and redshift-based priors, and its user interface is modeled on the popular HYPERZ (ascl:1108.010) code. The default template set, as well as the default functional forms of the priors, are not based on (usually highly biased) spectroscopic samples, but on semi-analytical models. Furthermore, template mismatch is addressed by a novel rest-frame template error function. This function gives different wavelength regions different weights, and ensures that the formal redshift uncertainties are realistic. A redshift quality parameter, Q_z, provides a robust estimate of the reliability of the photometric redshift estimate.

We perform N-body simulations of theories with infinite-volume extra dimensions, such as the Dvali-Gabadadze-Porrati (DGP) model and its higher-dimensional generalizations, where 4D gravity is mediated by massive gravitons. The longitudinal mode of these gravitons mediates an extra scalar force, which we model as a density-dependent modification to the Poisson equation. This enhances gravitational clustering, particularly on scales that have undergone mild nonlinear processing. While the standard non-linear fitting algorithm of Smith et al. overestimates this power enhancement on non-linear scales, we present a modified fitting formula that offers a remarkably good fit to our power spectra. Due to the uncertainty in galaxy bias, our results are consistent with precision power spectrum determinations from galaxy redshift surveys, even for graviton Compton wavelengths as small as 300 Mpc. Our model is sufficiently general that we expect it to capture the phenomenology of a wide class of related higher-dimensional gravity scenarios.

Large-scale coherent magnetic fields are observed in galaxies and clusters, but their ultimate origin remains a mystery. We reconsider the prospects for primordial magnetogenesis by a cosmic string network. We show that the magnetic flux produced by long strings has been overestimated in the past, and give improved estimates. We also compute the fields created by the loop population, and find that it gives the dominant contribution to the total magnetic field strength on present-day galactic scales. We present numerical results obtained by evolving semi-analytic models of string networks (including both one-scale and velocity-dependent one-scale models) in a Lambda-CDM cosmology, including the forces and torques on loops from Hubble redshifting, dynamical friction, and gravitational wave emission. Our predictions include the magnetic field strength as a function of correlation length, as well as the volume covered by magnetic fields. We conclude that string networks could account for magnetic fields on galactic scales, but only if coupled with an efficient dynamo amplification mechanism.

SYNOW is a highly parameterized spectrum synthesis code used primarily for direct (empirical) analysis of SN spectra. The code is based on simple assumptions : spherical symmetry; homologous expansion; a sharp photosphere that emits a blackbody continuous spectrum; and line formation by resonance scattering, treated in the Sobolev approximation. Synow does not do continuum transport, it does not solve rate equations, and it does not calculate ionization ratios. Its main function is to take line multiple scattering into account so that it can be used in an empirical spirit to make line identifications and estimate the velocity at the photosphere (or pseudo-photosphere) and the velocity interval within which each ion is detected. these quantities provide constraints on the composition structure of the ejected matter.

PHOENIX is a general-purpose state-of-the-art stellar and planetary atmosphere code. It can calculate atmospheres and spectra of stars all across the HR-diagram including main sequence stars, giants, white dwarfs, stars with winds, TTauri stars, novae, supernovae, brown dwarfs and extrasolar giant planets.

Tiny Tim generates simulated Hubble Space Telescope point spread functions (PSFs). It is written in C and distributed as source code and runs on a wide variety of UNIX and VMS systems. Tiny Tim includes mirror zonal errors, time dependent aberrations (for the pre-repair instruments), field dependent obscuration patterns (for WF/PC-1 and WFPC2), and filter passband effects. It can produce a normally sampled or subsampled PSF. Output is a FITS image file.

VINE is a particle based astrophysical simulation code. It uses a tree structure to efficiently solve the gravitational N-body problem and Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) to simulate gas dynamical effects. The code has been successfully used for a number of studies on galaxy interactions, galactic dynamics, star formation and planet formation and given the implemented physics, other applications are possible as well.

The Cesam code is a consistent set of programs and routines which perform calculations of 1D quasi-hydrostatic stellar evolution including microscopic diffusion of chemical species and diffusion of angular momentum. The solution of the quasi-static equilibrium is performed by a collocation method based on piecewise polynomials approximations projected on a B-spline basis; that allows stable and robust calculations, and the exact restitution of the solution, not only at grid points, even for the discontinuous variables. Other advantages are the monitoring by only one parameter of the accuracy and its improvement by super-convergence. An automatic mesh refinement has been designed for adjusting the localisations of grid points according to the changes of unknowns. For standard models, the evolution of the chemical composition is solved by stiffly stable schemes of orders up to four; in the convection zones mixing and evolution of chemical are simultaneous. The solution of the diffusion equation employs the Galerkin finite elements scheme; the mixing of chemicals is then performed by a strong turbulent diffusion. A precise restoration of the atmosphere is allowed for.

The Pencil code is a high-order finite-difference code for compressible hydrodynamic flows with magnetic fields. It is highly modular and can easily be adapted to different types of problems. The code runs efficiently under MPI on massively parallel shared- or distributed-memory computers, like e.g. large Beowulf clusters. The Pencil code is primarily designed to deal with weakly compressible turbulent flows. To achieve good parallelization, explicit (as opposed to compact) finite differences are used. Typical scientific targets include driven MHD turbulence in a periodic box, convection in a slab with non-periodic upper and lower boundaries, a convective star embedded in a fully nonperiodic box, accretion disc turbulence in the shearing sheet approximation, self-gravity, non-local radiation transfer, dust particle evolution with feedback on the gas, etc. A range of artificial viscosity and diffusion schemes can be invoked to deal with supersonic flows. For direct simulations regular viscosity and diffusion is being used. The code is written in well-commented Fortran90.

In EyE (Enhance Your Extraction) an artificial neural network connected to pixels of a moving window (retina) is trained to associate these input stimuli to the corresponding response in one or several output image(s). The resulting filter can be loaded in SExtractor (ascl:1010.064) to operate complex, wildly non-linear filters on astronomical images. Typical applications of EyE include adaptive filtering, feature detection and cosmetic corrections.

MissFITS is a program that performs basic maintenance and packaging tasks on FITS files using an optimized FITS library. MissFITS can:

- add, edit, and remove FITS header keywords;
- split and join Multi-Extension-FITS (MEF) files;
- unpile and pile FITS data-cubes; and,
- create, check, and update FITS checksums, using R. Seaman’s protocol.

Astrometric and photometric calibrations have remained the most tiresome step in the reduction of large imaging surveys. SCAMP has been written to address this problem. The program efficiently computes accurate astrometric and photometric solutions for any arbitrary sequence of FITS images in a completely automatic way. SCAMP is released under the GNU General Public License.

This new software optimally detects, de-blends, measures and classifies sources from astronomical images: SExtractor (Source Extractor). A very reliable star/galaxy separation can be achieved on most images using a neural network trained with simulated images. Salient features of SExtractor include its ability to work on very large images, with minimal human intervention, and to deal with a wide variety of object shapes and magnitudes. It is therefore particularly suited to the analysis of large extragalactic surveys.

Motivated by experimental probes of general relativity, we adopt methods from perturbative (quantum) field theory to compute, up to certain integrals, the effective lagrangian for its n-body problem. Perturbation theory is performed about a background Minkowski spacetime to O[(v/c)^4] beyond Newtonian gravity, where v is the typical speed of these n particles in their center of energy frame. For the specific case of the 2 body problem, the major efforts underway to measure gravitational waves produced by in-spiraling compact astrophysical binaries require their gravitational interactions to be computed beyond the currently known O[(v/c)^7]. We argue that such higher order post-Newtonian calculations must be automated for these field theoretic methods to be applied successfully to achieve this goal. In view of this, we outline an algorithm that would in principle generate the relevant Feynman diagrams to an arbitrary order in v/c and take steps to develop the necessary software. The Feynman diagrams contributing to the n-body effective action at O[(v/c)^6] beyond Newton are derived.

SkyMaker simulates astronomical images. It accepts object lists in ASCII generated by the Stuff program (ascl:1010.067) to produce realistic astronomical fields. SkyMaker is part of the EFIGI development project.

Stuff is a program that simulates “perfect” astronomical catalogues. It generate object lists in ASCII which can read by the SkyMaker program to produce realistic astronomical fields. Stuff is part of the EFIGI development project.

SWarp resamples and co-adds together FITS images using any arbitrary astrometric projection defined in the WCS standard. It operates on pre-reduced images and their weight-maps. Based on the astrometric and photometric calibrations derived at an earlier phase of the pipeline, SWarp re-maps ("warps") the pixels to a perfect projection system, and co-adds them in an optimum way, according to their relative weights. SWarp's astrometric engine is based on a customized version of Calabretta's WCSLib 2.6 and supports all of the projections defined in the 2000 version of the WCS proposal.

WeightWatcher is a program that combines weight-maps, flag-maps and polygon data in order to produce control maps which can directly be used in astronomical image-processing packages like Drizzle, SWarp or SExtractor.

Fisher.py allows you to combine constraints from multiple experiments (e.g., weak lensing + supernovae) and add priors (e.g., a flat universe) simply and easily. Calculate parameter uncertainties and plot confidence ellipses. Fisher matrix expectations for several experiments are included as calculated by myself (time delays) and the Dark Energy Task Force (WL/SN/BAO/CL/CMB), or provide your own.

Pairwise forces between particles in cosmological N-body simulations are generally softened to avoid hard collisions. Physically, this softening corresponds to treating the particles as diffuse clouds rather than point masses. For particles of unequal mass (and hence unequal softening length), computing the softened force involves a nontrivial double integral over the volumes of the two particles. We show that Plummer force softening is consistent with this interpretation of softening while spline softening is not. We provide closed-form expressions and numerical implementation for pairwise gravitational force laws for pairs of particles of general softening scales $epsilon_1$ and $epsilon_2$ assuming the commonly used cloud profiles: NGP, CIC, TSC, and PQS. Similarly, we generalize Plummer force law into pairs of particles of general softenings. We relate our expressions to the gaussian, Plummer and spline force softenings known from literature. Our expressions allow possible inclusions of pointlike particles such as stars or supermassive black holes.

Enzo is an adaptive mesh refinement (AMR), grid-based hybrid code (hydro + N-Body) which is designed to do simulations of cosmological structure formation. It uses the algorithms of Berger & Collela to improve spatial and temporal resolution in regions of large gradients, such as gravitationally collapsing objects. The Enzo simulation software is incredibly flexible, and can be used to simulate a wide range of cosmological situations with the available physics packages.

Enzo has been parallelized using the MPI message-passing library and can run on any shared or distributed memory parallel supercomputer or PC cluster. Simulations using as many as 1024 processors have been successfully carried out on the San Diego Supercomputing Center's Blue Horizon, an IBM SP.

In dense clusters a bewildering variety of interactions between stars can be observed, ranging from simple encounters to collisions and other mass-transfer encounters. With faster and special-purpose computers like GRAPE, the amount of data per simulation is now exceeding 1TB. Visualization of such data has now become a complex 4D data-mining problem, combining space and time, and finding interesting events in these large datasets. We have recently starting using the virtual reality simulator, installed in the Hayden Planetarium in the American Museum for Natural History, to tackle some of these problem. partiview is a program that enables you to visualize and animate particle data. partiview runs on relatively simple desktops and laptops, but is mostly compatible with its big brother VirDir.

StarCrash is a parallel fortran code based on Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) techniques to calculate the 3-d evolution of self-gravitating fluid systems. The code in particularly suited to the study of stellar interactions, such as mergers of binary star systems and stellar collisions. The StarCrash code comes with several important features, including:

• Several routines which construct the initial conditions appropriate to a wide variety of physical systems
  
• An efficient parallel neighbor-finding algorithm for calculating hydrodynamic quantities
  
• A parallel gravitational field solver based on FFT convolution techniques, which uses the FFTW software libraries
  
• Relaxation Techniques for single stars and synchronized binaries
  
• Three different artificial viscosity treatments to calculate the thermodynamic evolution of the matter
  
• An optional gravitational radiation back-reaction treatment, which calculates the damping force from gravity wave losses to lowest relativistic order in a spatially accurate way

The large quantity and high quality of modern radio and infrared line observations require efficient modeling techniques to infer physical and chemical parameters such as temperature, density, and molecular abundances. Radex calculates the intensities of atomic and molecular lines produced in a uniform medium, based on statistical equilibrium calculations involving collisional and radiative processes and including radiation from background sources. Optical depth effects are treated with an escape probability method. The program makes use of molecular data files maintained in the Leiden Atomic and Molecular Database (LAMDA), which will continue to be improved and expanded. The performance of the program is compared with more approximate and with more sophisticated methods. An Appendix provides diagnostic plots to estimate physical parameters from line intensity ratios of commonly observed molecules. This program should form an important tool in analyzing observations from current and future radio and infrared telescopes.

Traditionally, a simulation of a dense stellar system required choosing an initial model, running an integrator, and analyzing the output. Almost all of the effort went into writing a clever integrator that could handle binaries, triples and encounters between various multiple systems efficiently. Recently, the scope and complexity of these simulations has increased dramatically, for three reasons: 1) the sheer size of the data sets, measured in Terabytes, make traditional 'awking and grepping' of a single output file impractical; 2) the addition of stellar evolution data brings qualitatively new challenges to the data reduction; 3) increased realism of the simulations invites realistic forms of 'SOS': Simulations of Observations of Simulations, to be compared directly with observations. We are now witnessing a shift toward the construction of archives as well as tailored forms of visualization including the use of virtual reality simulators and planetarium domes, and a coupling of both with budding efforts in constructing virtual observatories. This review describes these new trends, presenting Starlab as the first example of a full software environment for realistic large-scale simulations of dense stellar systems.

LAMDA provides users of radiative transfer codes with the basic atomic and molecular data needed for the excitation calculation. Line data of a number of astrophysically interesting species are summarized, including energy levels, statistical weights, Einstein A-coefficients and collisional rate coefficients. Available collisional data from quantum chemical calculations and experiments are in some cases extrapolated to higher energies. Currently the database contains atomic data for 3 species and molecular data for 28 different species. In addition, several isotopomers and deuterated versions are available. This database should form an important tool in analyzing observations from current and future infrared and (sub)millimetre telescopes. Databases such as these rely heavily on the efforts by the chemical physics community to provide the relevant atomic and molecular data. Further efforts in this direction are strongly encouraged so that the current extrapolations of collisional rate coefficients can be replaced by actual calculations in future releases.

RADEX (ascl:1010.075), a computer program for performing statistical equilibrium calculations, is made publicly available as part of the data base.

Over the past few years, the role of visualization for scientific purpose has grown up enormously. Astronomy makes an extended use of visualization techniques to analyze data, and scientific visualization has became a fundamental part of modern researches in Astronomy. With the evolution of high performance computers, numerical simulations have assumed a great role in the scientific investigation, allowing the user to run simulation with higher and higher resolution. Data produced in these simulations are often multi-dimensional arrays with several physical quantities. These data are very hard to manage and to analyze efficiently. Consequently the data analysis and visualization tools must follow the new requirements of the research. AstroMD is a tool for data analysis and visualization of astrophysical data and can manage different physical quantities and multi-dimensional data sets. The tool uses virtual reality techniques by which the user has the impression of travelling through a computer-based multi-dimensional model.

Geant4 is a toolkit for simulating the passage of particles through matter. It includes a complete range of functionality including tracking, geometry, physics models and hits. The physics processes offered cover a comprehensive range, including electromagnetic, hadronic and optical processes, a large set of long-lived particles, materials and elements, over a wide energy range starting, in some cases, from 250eV and extending in others to the TeV energy range. It has been designed and constructed to expose the physics models utilised, to handle complex geometries, and to enable its easy adaptation for optimal use in different sets of applications. The toolkit is the result of a worldwide collaboration of physicists and software engineers. It has been created exploiting software engineering and object-oriented technology and implemented in the C++ programming language. It has been used in applications in particle physics, nuclear physics, accelerator design, space engineering and medical physics.

The GRACOS (GRAvitational COSmology) code, a parallel implementation of the particle-particle/particle-mesh (P3M) algorithm for distributed memory clusters, uses a hybrid method for both computation and domain decomposition. Long-range forces are computed using a Fourier transform gravity solver on a regular mesh; the mesh is distributed across parallel processes using a static one-dimensional slab domain decomposition. Short-range forces are computed by direct summation of close pairs; particles are distributed using a dynamic domain decomposition based on a space-filling Hilbert curve. A nearly-optimal method was devised to dynamically repartition the particle distribution so as to maintain load balance even for extremely inhomogeneous mass distributions. Tests using $800^3$ simulations on a 40-processor beowulf cluster showed good load balance and scalability up to 80 processes. There are limits on scalability imposed by communication and extreme clustering which may be removed by extending the algorithm to include adaptive mesh refinement.

We have developed MGGPOD, a user-friendly suite of Monte Carlo codes built around the widely used GEANT (Version 3.21) package. The MGGPOD Monte Carlo suite and documentation are publicly available for download. MGGPOD is an ideal tool for supporting the various stages of gamma-ray astronomy missions, ranging from the design, development, and performance prediction through calibration and response generation to data reduction. In particular, MGGPOD is capable of simulating ab initio the physical processes relevant for the production of instrumental backgrounds. These include the build-up and delayed decay of radioactive isotopes as well as the prompt de-excitation of excited nuclei, both of which give rise to a plethora of instrumental gamma-ray background lines in addition to continuum backgrounds.

The FLASH code, currently in its 4th version, is a publicly available high performance application code which has evolved into a modular, extensible software system from a collection of unconnected legacy codes. FLASH consists of inter-operable modules that can be combined to generate different applications. The FLASH architecture allows arbitrarily many alternative implementations of its components to co-exist and interchange with each other. A simple and elegant mechanism exists for customization of code functionality without the need to modify the core implementation of the source. A built-in unit test framework combined with regression tests that run nightly on multiple platforms verify the code.

Stellar physics and evolution calculations enable a broad range of research in astrophysics. Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA) is a suite of open source libraries for a wide range of applications in computational stellar astrophysics. A newly designed 1-D stellar evolution module, MESA star, combines many of the numerical and physics modules for simulations of a wide range of stellar evolution scenarios ranging from very-low mass to massive stars, including advanced evolutionary phases. MESA star solves the fully coupled structure and composition equations simultaneously. It uses adaptive mesh refinement and sophisticated timestep controls, and supports shared memory parallelism based on OpenMP. Independently usable modules provide equation of state, opacity, nuclear reaction rates, and atmosphere boundary conditions. Each module is constructed as a separate Fortran 95 library with its own public interface. Examples include comparisons to other codes and show evolutionary tracks of very low mass stars, brown dwarfs, and gas giant planets; the complete evolution of a 1 Msun star from the pre-main sequence to a cooling white dwarf; the Solar sound speed profile; the evolution of intermediate mass stars through the thermal pulses on the He-shell burning AGB phase; the interior structure of slowly pulsating B Stars and Beta Cepheids; evolutionary tracks of massive stars from the pre-main sequence to the onset of core collapse; stars undergoing Roche lobe overflow; and accretion onto a neutron star.