Overview

pNbody is a parallelized python module toolbox designed to manipulate and display interactively very large N-body systems.

Its oriented object approach allows to perform complicated manipulation with only very few commands.

As python is an interpreted language, the user can load an N-body system and explore it interactively using the python interpreter. However, pNbody can also be used in complex python scripts.

In particular pNbody is designed to:

• extract many relevant physical quantities from n-body systems

• ease the extraction of particles from an n-body system or merging different systems together

• create realistic surface brightness images of galaxies

• create and display maps of physical values of the system, like density, temperature, velocities, metallicity. Stereo rendering is also implemented.

• generate initial conditions of idealized self-gravitating collision-less models through the Jeans equations or by properly sampling distribution functions.

pNbody is not limited by the file format. Users can redefine in a parameter file how to read its favorite format.

Its parallel (MPI/mpi4py) extension make it work on computer clusters without being limited by memory consumption. It has already been tested with hundreds of millions of particles.