UNIVERSE in a BOX Computational Fluid Dynamics
in Astrophysics

Presentation

The XXXI Canary Islands Winter School of Astrophysics, organized by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), focusses on Computational Fluid Dynamics in Astrophysics. The school, to be held in San Cristóbal de La Laguna (Tenerife, Spain) from 19 to 28 November 2019, will admit about 60 PhD students and young Post-Docs. In a relaxed environment, the school will give participants the opportunity to learn from world-renowned specialists about the techniques used in astrophysics in the modelling of fluid dynamics. Participants of the Winter School will have the opportunity to highlight their current work by presenting a poster. The duration of the school, including the visits to the observatories, is equivalent to a total of 48 hours (5.0 academic credits). Deadline for both registration and application is 30 June 2019 (15 June 2019, if applying for financial support).

Scientific rationale

Numerical astrophysics requires skills that go beyond the pure knowledge of the applicable physical laws. Physical intuition needs to be translated into algorithms and numerical codes. Developing a numerical code involves technical knowledge that is not limited to mastering the synthax of a specific programming language. In particular, the development of parallel applications requires abstraction of the physical problem, design of algorithms within the framework of modern computing architectures and optimisation of the codes to achieve maximum performance. The many fields of numerical astrophysics included in the school greatly necessitate of young researchers with a good background in both science and numerics. The programming skills and knowledge acquired in the field of CFD constitute an excellent basis for jobs in both private and public technology-oriented companies. It is of primary interest for the community to encourage students to take a career path towards computational fluid dynamics in astrophysics, without losing the focus on the scientific questions numerical astrophysics aims at answering.

For these reasons we propose to gather students from various fields of astrophysics (covering a large range of astrophysical scales and problems) under the common interest in computational hydrodynamics. The school has been designed in order to provide a complete overview of applications of numerical hydrodynamics in these research fields, focussing on the science developed in each field, as well as on the numerical techniques employed. We aim to foster synergy between the different fields because the same algorithms can be used to solve different problems, or similar problems in different fields have found different numerical solutions. Another aim of the school is to promote modern programming practice, as, e.g. the use of the version control infrastructure, the choice of data format, code verification, profiling and optimisation, and documentation. This will be partly taught in the lectures, and mostly learnt during the hands-on sessions.

Relevant dates

Organizing committee

• Claudio Dalla Vecchia (Co-Director of the School)
• Nikola Vitas (Co-Director of the School)
• Elena Khomenko (Co-Director of the School)
• Ignacio González Martínez-Pais (Head of the IAC Graduate Studies division)
• Rafael Rebolo (Director of the IAC) 

Secretariat

• Lourdes González Pérez (Secretary of the IAC Graduate Studies division)