I took a break from writing code today and finished reading Bruno’s paper on continuous stellar mass loss in N-body simulations. His code used the particle mesh method and included some heuristics for mass loss and star formation. The “sticky particles” method was used in modeling collisions of gas clouds. There seemed to be very little actual physics in the simulation.

I’m still evaluating different possibilities for visualizing my N-body simulation output. The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) is the newest possibility I’ve found. It’s the foundation on which many other visualization systems are built. Hopefully I’ll be able to make a decision by the end of next week.

My interest in CUDA is growing once again.  Once I become more experienced with programming in C / C++, it should be easier to learn CUDA.  I found an interesting little PDF on using CUDA for N-body simulations: here.  I have the necessary hardware and software to develop CUDA programs–I just need to learn a bit more.

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