Student Posters Repository

Observing planet formation in detail is hard, since planets are small, dark and only form far away from earth. The formation of smaller objects like asteroids poses an even bigger challenge. We try to shed light on the gasless stage of planet formation (when there is so much dust in a given region, that gas influence becomes neglectable) using a GPU based Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulation. While SPH is commonly used for fluid simulation like gases and liquids, at it's core we find a method for solving partial differential equations that can be extended to simulate solids, deformable objects and granular materials. The flexible CUDA implementation allows for test runs at interactive speeds even on a laptop computer, as well as slower high accuracy simulations on workstations and supercomputing nodes that feature more powerful GPUs. While test runs show promising results, we are currently working to increase the supported particle number as well the stability of the used algorithms. Along with accelerating the code further, that will allow us to simulate larger time frames and explore object formation in the outer solar system. We hope to extend the model in the future to also handle gas-solid-interaction.