As part our effort to stimulate international collaboration in computational science and astrophysics we organized three workshops, two within the MODEST consortium and one specialized for the further development of a numerical framework to simulate dense star clusters.
MODEST stands for MOdeling DEnse STellar systems, and is a loosely knit collaboration between various groups in Europe, the USA and Japan working in stellar dynamics, evolution, and hydrodynamics and computational science. Our aim is to provide a software framework for large scale simulations of dense stellar systems, in which existing codes for dynamics, stellar evolution, and hydrodynamics can be easily coupled (see http://manybody.org/modest.html).
Amsterdam has become one of the major interdisciplinary meeting points for the MODEST consortium, in part by organizing two workshops, one on the general MODEST (December 2002) paradigm and one on the development of parallel N-body algorithms on dedicated and distributed computers (June 2004).
More information about MODEST workshops can found at
http://manybody.org/modest/workshops.html
Workshop MODEST-2 was held in December 2002. (A review on MODEST-2 is published in New Astronomy [4].)1
Workshop MODEST-4b was held in June 20042
In addition we organized a dedicated software developers starlab workshop, which was held at the Astronomical Institute 'Anton Pannekoek' in December 2002.