Special modes

SWIFT comes with a few special modes of operating to perform additional tasks.

Disabling particle types

To save some meory, SWIFT can be compiled with support for reduced number of particles. This will make many structures in the code discard the variables related to these particles and hence lead to a leaner code. This can be useful, for instance, for very large DMO runs.

This is achieved by compiling with one or more of these:

• --with-hydro=none

• --with-stars=none

• --with-sinks=none

• --with-black-holes=none

The code will then naturally complain if particles of the cancelled types are found in the simulation.

Static particles

For some test problems it is convenient to have a set of particles that do not perceive any gravitational forces and just act as sources for the force calculation. This can be achieved by configuring SWIFT with the option --enable-no-gravity-below-id=N. This will zero the accelerations of all particles with id (strictly) lower than N at every time-step. Note that if these particles have an initial velocity they will keep moving at that speed.

This will also naturally set their time-step to the maximal value (TimeIntegration:dt_max) set in the parameter file.

A typical use-case for this feature is to study the evolution of one particle orbiting a static halo made of particles. This can be used to assess the quality of the gravity tree and time integration. As more particles are added to the halo, the orbits will get closer to the analytic solution as the noise in the sampling of the halo is reduced.

Note also that this does not affect the hydrodynamic forces. This mode is purely designed for gravity-only accuracy tests.

Besides the pure gravity mode, swift also has the boundary particle mode, this mode turns off both the gravity forces and hydro forces for all particles. Because gas particles only receive hydro this mode only impacts gas particles more strictly than other particles. This mode can be activated using --enable-boundary-particles=N. This will zero the gravitational and hydrodynamic accelerations of all particles with id (strictly) lower than N at every time-step. Still if particles have an initial velocity they will keep moving at that speed. This compilation option also activates --enable-no-gravity-below-id=N.

Typical use cases are hydrodynamical experiments that have boundaries.

Both options discussed above only cancel accelerations and have no impact on what can happen in any code module that directly changes the velocity of the boundary or no gravity particles. An example of this is momentum injection of stellar winds for example. If we additionally want to keep the boundary particles fixed at the same position for the whole simulation we can use the --enable-fixed-boundary-particles=N compile option, this option explicitly sets the velocity of the boundary particles to zero every time step on top of also zeroing the accelerations.

A typical use cases is an idealized setup in which we have a black hole in the centre of a galaxy that accretes gas but is not allowed to move from the momentum recoil of the gas it swallows.

Gravity glasses

For many problems in cosmology, it is important to start a simulation with no initial noise in the particle distribution. Such a “glass” can be created by starting from a random distribution of particles and running with the sign of gravity reversed until all the particles reach a steady state. To run SWIFT in this mode, configure the code with --enable-glass-making.

Note that this will not generate the initial random distribution of particles. An initial condition file with particles still has to be provided.

Gravity force checks

To test the accuracy of the gravitational forces approximated by the code, SWIFT can be configured with the option to additionally compute the “exact” forces for each active particle during each timestep. Here the exact forces are simply the Newtonian sum, i.e.,

\(\vec{F}_{i,j} = \sum^{n}_{i \neq j} \frac{G m_i m_j}{\vec{r}_{i,j}^2}.\)

To run SWIFT in this mode, configure the code with --enable-gravity-force-checks=N, which means that the exact forces will be computed for every \(N^{th}\) particle based on their ID (i.e., to compute the exact forces for all particles set N=1).

Two .dat files will be output during each timestep, one containing the forces (really it is the accelerations that are stored) as computed by _swift_, and another containing the _exact_ forces. The total force (a_swift), along with the contributed force from each component of the tree (P2P, M2P and M2L) and the FFT mesh if periodic (PM) is stored (i.e., a_swift[0] = a_p2p[0] + a_m2p[0] + a_m2l[0] + a_PM[0], for the \(x\) component). In addition, the number of particles contributing to each force component is also stored (these numbers will add up to \(n-1\)).

This mode will slow down the code considerably, and it is not recommended to be run on problems with more than \(10^{5}\) particles when --enable-gravity-force-checks=1. For larger runs, sampling a sub-set of particles via the argument N of the configuration option is recommended. This mode must be run on a single node/rank, and is primarily designed for pure gravity tests (i.e., DMO).