Draft:SWIFT (simulation software)
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This draft's references do not show that the subject meets Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion. The draft requires multiple published secondary sources that:
Declined by Quxyz 48 days ago.
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Comment: WP:INDISCRIMINATE is not passed here, it is not explained why this software is important, and the projects that are described as using it do not have articles. It reads as a laundry list of what it is capable of but not what it has gained recognition for. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 04:47, 31 August 2026 (UTC)
- Comment: Two sources are not independent and the other does not pass WP:SIGCOV. Possible original research or synthesis, too. ✶Quxyz✶ (talk) 23:33, 15 August 2026 (UTC)
| SWIFT | |
|---|---|
| Developers | SWIFT Project Team (Durham University, ICC) |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | POSIX-compliant (Linux, macOS) |
| Type | Computational astrophysics, computational fluid dynamics |
| License | GNU GPLv3 |
| Website | www |
SWIFT (an acronym for "SPH With Inter-dependent Fine-grained Tasking") is free software for cosmological N-body and SPH simulations developed by the SWIFT Project Team at Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC). It is released under the GNU GPLv3.[1] The code is designed to study galaxy formation,[1] cosmology, and planetary science (such as giant planetary impacts).[2]
Description
[edit]SWIFT computes gravitational forces with a hierarchical Fast Multipole Method (FMM), optionally coupled to a particle-mesh (PM) scheme for long-range periodic boundary conditions. Fluids and gaseous components are represented using smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH), with multiple modern formulations implemented, including Pressure-Energy SPH, SPHENIX, and the REMIX scheme for improved fluid mixing at density discontinuities.[1] The code can be used for isolated systems (such as merging galaxies and planetary collisions) or for simulations that include the cosmological expansion of space, with or without periodic boundary conditions. Both the gravitational force computation and the time-stepping of SWIFT are fully adaptive.
SWIFT can be used to address a wide array of astrophysically interesting problems, ranging from colliding and merging galaxies to the formation of large-scale structure in the universe. With the inclusion of additional physical processes such as radiative cooling, chemistry, star formation, and feedback from supernovae and black holes, SWIFT is used to study the dynamics of the intergalactic medium and galaxy evolution.[1] The computational architecture is written in C and built around fine-grained, task-based parallelism, employing asynchronous non-blocking communications, Structure-of-Arrays (SoA) memory layouts, and SIMD vectorization (including AVX-512), scaling across more than 100,000 cores,[3] with GPU acceleration strategies investigated for heterogeneous supercomputing architectures.[4]
SWIFT uses the HDF5 hierarchical data format for reading initial conditions and writing simulation snapshots, enabling high-throughput parallel I/O and direct compatibility with cosmological analysis pipelines[1] such as swiftsimio[5] and SWIFTGalaxy.[6]
History
[edit]Development of SWIFT began in 2015 at Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology, led by Matthieu Schaller, Pedro Gonnet, and collaborators. The code was conceived to overcome the scaling bottlenecks of legacy cosmological simulation software such as GADGET on modern multicore and massively parallel supercomputers. The initial task-based computing model and scaling achievements were published in Schaller et al. (2016).[3] A comprehensive description of the production code was published in Schaller et al. (2024).[1]
SWIFT serves as the simulation engine for flagship cosmological projects including the COLIBRE (Cosmological Low-mass Intergalactic Baryons and Relative Evolution) and SIBELIUS (Simulations Beyond the Local Universe) simulation suites, as well as ultra-high-resolution simulations of the Moon's formation via giant planetary impact.[2]
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- 1 2 3 4 5 6 Schaller, Matthieu; et al. (June 2024). "SWIFT: A modern highly-parallel gravity and smoothed particle hydrodynamics solver for astrophysical and cosmological applications". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 530 (2): 2378–2419. arXiv:2305.13380. Bibcode:2024MNRAS.530.2378S. doi:10.1093/mnras/stae922.
- 1 2 Kegerreis, J. A.; et al. (October 2022). "Immediate Origin of the Moon as a Post-impact Satellite". The Astrophysical Journal Letters. 937 (2): L40. arXiv:2210.01814. Bibcode:2022ApJ...937L..40K. doi:10.3847/2041-8213/ac8d96.
- 1 2 Schaller, Matthieu; Gonnet, Pedro; Draper, Peter W.; Chalk, Aidan B. G.; Bower, Richard G.; Willis, James; Hausammann, Loic (June 2016). SWIFT: Using Task-Based Parallelism, Fully Asynchronous Communication, and Graph Partition-Based Domain Decomposition for Strong Scaling on more than 100,000 Cores. PASC '16: Proceedings of the Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing Conference. pp. 1–10. arXiv:1606.02738. Bibcode:2016pasc.conf....2S. doi:10.1145/2929908.2929916.
- ↑ Nasar, Abouzied M. A.; et al. (2026). "Task-Parallelism in SWIFT for Heterogeneous Compute Architectures". RASTI. arXiv:2505.14538.
- ↑ Borrow, Josh; Borrisov, Alexei (August 2020). "swiftsimio: A Python library for reading SWIFT data". Journal of Open Source Software. 5 (52): 2430. doi:10.21105/joss.02430.
- ↑ Oman, Kyle A. (October 2025). "SWIFTGalaxy: a Python package to work with particle groups from SWIFT simulations". Journal of Open Source Software. 10 (114): 9278. arXiv:2510.22328. doi:10.21105/joss.09278.
External links
[edit]Category:Free astronomy software Category:Cosmological simulation Category:Astronomy software
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