[Astro] Lunch Talk

[Michael Anderson Jennings]

Hi Everyone,

This week's lunch talk will be given by Jimi on Thursday at 1pm in A113. Title and abstract are below:

Jalaxies: A Semi Analytic Model Factory

Semi Analytic Models (SAMs) provide a rich testbed for a wide variety of different astrophysical theories. The ability for SAMs to produce large galaxy catalogues within reasonable timeframes, even on moderate hardware, enables rapid refinement of novel galaxy evolution models as well as the ability to quickly produce companion mock surveys matching the parameters of new observations. However, SAMs still suffer the same problem much of astronomy is encumbered by: too much data and too little manpower to process it. The requirement for SAMs to be performant (often being programmed in immensely optimized C, C++ or FORTRAN code) inhibit the speed at which an experienced user can make additions and often prevents any users without a strong technical background from using them at all. This issue is accentuated in the era of JWST,  where quickly reevaluating our models of galaxy formation in response to unprecedented observations is crucial.  I present "Jalaxies", a project that aims to fully decouple the highly optimized core code required by a typical SAM from the actual descriptions of the analytic mechanisms. Jalaxies takes simple pythonic-esque descriptions for each mechanism in a target SAM and produces a fully self-contained, stack optimized, and highly parallel Rust binary.  The easy and intuitive adjustments to models that Jalaxies allows, along with support for: both a GUI and a terminal interface, on the fly cosmology rescaling,  easily transferable JSON descriptions of the SAM,  simple IO optimized tree files, various output types such as lightcones and galaxy trees, and the ability to output directly into numpy compatible file formats, means even the most technophobic astronomer can produce science with Jalaxies the very same day it was downloaded.

Thanks,
Mikey


Mikey Anderson Jennings
Astronomy PhD Student
University of Nottingham
Centre for Astronomy and Particle Theory

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.nottingham.ac.uk/pipermail/astro/attachments/20250203/f1b090a4/attachment.htm>