Research team:
P.I. Simon Portegies Zwart (Faculty, API&SCS)
Willem Vermin (SARA), Ron Trompert (SARA), Alessia Gualandris, Michael Sipior

Ojective: Parallelize a scientific production code for the direct integration of particle systems. The centerpiece of Starlab is a dynamical integrator known as kira. Conceived and written as an independent alternative to Aarseth's NBODY4 and NBODY5, the workhorses of collisional N-body calculations for the past 25 years, kira is a high-order predictor-corrector scheme designed for simulations of collisional stellar systems. Kira incorporates a Hermite integration scheme, a block time step scheduler, and a adaptive binary tree structure that allows homogeneous treatment of all objects in the system, including hierarchical structures of arbitrary complexity. The modular internal organization of Starlab allows additional pieces of physics, such as stellar and binary evolution, or hydrodynamical simulations of particular stellar interactions, to be added, tested, and modified without major changes in the rest of the code. This project is part of the A Bunch of Grapes project.