Mechanic: a new numerical MPI framework for the dynamical astronomy

Abstract

We develop the Mechanic package, which is a new numerical framework for dynamical astronomy. The aim of our software is to help in massive numerical simulations by efficient task management and unified data storage. The code is built on top of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Hierarchical Data Format (HDF5) standards and uses the Task Farm approach to manage numerical tasks. It relies on the core-module approach. The numerical problem implemented in the user-supplied module is separated from the host code (core). The core is designed to handle basic setup, data storage and communication between nodes in a computing pool. It has been tested on large CPU-clusters, as well as desktop computers. The Mechanic may be used in computing dynamical maps, data optimization or numerical integration. The code and sample modules are freely available at http://git.astri.umk.pl/projects/mechanic.