Multidisciplinary Character of the Research

The Computational Science group and the Astrophysics group have complementary, and overlapping expertise, guaranteeing that this project will result in a truly interdisciplinary research and long lasting scientific co-operation between the groups. The Computer Science group has much expertise in subjects from computational science, such as the N-Body model, hierarchical methods, and numerical aspects related to time integration algorithms. Furthermore, they have much expertise on Parallel and Distributed computing, on run time support systems, and maintaining complex computing infrastructures, which is very relevant to set-up the proposed N-body computing lab [e.g. 11-13].The Astrophysical group have great expertise in numerical computation of stellar evolution, and through the collaboration with the groups of Prof. Hut, Prof. Makino and Prof. Verbunt have much expertise in stellar dynamics [e.g. 14, 15].