New Nbody Version 1.50
Hey all,

We have released a new version of Nbody. There are a few changes in this version. First and foremost, we changed the way dark and light matter in our model dwarf galaxy is assigned. Previously, we would have all the particles have the same mass and assign a certain number as dark or light, depending on the parameters of the simulation. This required a large number of bodies in order to get a good likelihood calculation. Now, we will have the same number of dark and light matter particles, but change the mass per light and dark matter particle in accordance to the parameters. This will allow us to lower the number of bodies from 50k to 20k, allowing for a much faster initialization and simulation run time.

Secondly, we have moved the assignment of dark and light matter from lua to c, which should also provide significant speed up in the run time.

Also, we fixed a number of bugs we found in the velocity assignment. All in all, a simulation should run at a fraction of the time previously. This will also hopefully fix the stalling issue some people have been having.

Finally, if you have any runs from the previously version, you can go ahead and abort them.

Since this is a new way of doing things, there may be some unforeseen issues. So, if there are any bugs let us know!

More...