[MODEST] On MODEST

[Rainer Spurzem]

    Dear all,

    here is my little bit of what I think could be a contribution from
 our side to the MODEST initiative. Working mainly on idealised systems,
 very often point masses, and models based on statistical mechanics
 (Fokker-Planck, Monte Carlo, gaseous models) I would not see us in the
 forefront of implementing the hot interfaces between hydro/stellar evolution
 and stellar dynamics. However, especially in the statistical models,
 we are improving the realism gradually, and include e.g. stellar
 evolution in gas models or Monte Carlo (Mirek does this actually,
 and also the group of Fred Rasio I think). So here we would be
 interested to watch and make sure that the interfaces for evolution
 of single stars (to mention this example) could be used also in some
 way for the approximate models. For the star-by-star Monte Carlo codes
 this is rather straight-forward. For the Fokker-Planck codes (in our
 group we mainly work with 2D orbit averaged FP for rotating clusters
 and 1D gas models for anisotropic spherical star clusters) this is
 less straightforward. The use of MODEST interfaces would require 
 a ``discretization'' of our system, call of the routines, and an
 averaging / binning procedure afterwards again.

   The second point I would be interested in the MODEST context is to work 
 together with Sverre to keep our parallel NBODY6++ codes on the same 
 MODEST stage of evolution as his standard NBODY6/NBODY4 codes,
 and take care that the parallelization still works and so on.
 Well I guess that Marc Hemsendorf also likes to participate in this.

   Many thanks to the organisers for all their efforts so far, and looking
 forward to the MODEST-2 and -3 meetings.

   All the best

   Rainer

-- 
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 Rainer Spurzem                      spurzem at ari.uni-heidelberg.de

 Astronomisches Rechen-Institut                   Phone +49-6221-405-230
 M"onchhofstrasse 12-14, 69120 Heidelberg         Fax   +49-6221-405-297

 http://www.ari.uni-heidelberg.de/mitarbeiter/spurzem/index.html

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