Affiliations: Physics Department, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1
3RH, UK | Harvard-Smithsonian CFA, Cambridge, MA 02138,
USA | Lab. for Computational Asrophysics, UC San Diego, La
Jolla, CA 92093-0424, USA
Abstract: As an entry for the 2001 Gordon Bell Award in the "special"
category, we describe our 3-d, hybrid, adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) code Enzo
designed for high-resolution, multiphysics, cosmological structure formation
simulations. Our parallel implementation places no limit on the depth or
complexity of the adaptive grid hierarchy, allowing us to achieve unprecedented
spatial and temporal dynamic range. We report on a simulation of primordial
star formation which develops over 8000 subgrids at 34 levels of refinement to
achieve a local refinement of a factor of 10^{12} in space
and time. This allows us to resolve the properties of the first stars which
form in the universe assuming standard physics and a standard cosmological
model. Achieving extreme resolution requires the use of 128-bit extended
precision arithmetic (EPA) to accurately specify the subgrid positions. We
describe our EPA AMR implementation on the IBM SP2 Blue Horizon system at the
San Diego Supercomputer Center.
