The WAVES suite consists of N-body simulations of a periodic volume of side 210 Mpc/h ~ 310 Mpc containing up to 68.7 billion particles, run assuming a Planck cosmology.
This choice of parameters allows us to resolve the host halos of galaxies with stellar masses of 1e8 M☉ at z=0, with the nominal requirement that the host dark matter halos of such galaxies are resolved with 100 particles, necessary if we are to model merger trees for coupling to semi-analytical models.
All simulations will be run with a memory-lean version of the GADGET2 code on the Magnus supercomputer at the Pawsey supercomputing centre. Data will be stored in raw binary format and each run will generate between 150 and 200 outputs, depending on the results of testing with the micro and mini runs. For the largest run this will produce up to 300-400 TBs worth of data, although these data will be processed immediately upon output (to produce halo catalogues and smoothed density and velocity maps) and then transferred to deep storage.
Rough parameters of the the runs are given in Table 1.
Table 1: N-body input parameters
| BoxSize [Mpc/h] | Np_side | m_p,dm [Msol/h] | m_halo,res [Msol/h] | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| micro | 40 | 512 | 4.07e7 | 4.07e9 |
| mini | 210 | 512 | 5.90e9 | 5.90e11 |
| medium | 210 | 1024 | 7.37e8 | 7.37e10 |
| max | 210 | 2048 | 9.22e7 | 9.22e9 |
| ultramax | 210 | 4096 | 1.15e7 | 1.15e9 |
Whilst survey design is underway, readers should note that the numbers given here are estimates.