Particle simulation of 3D galactic hydrodynamics on the ICL DAP

A non-self-gravitating galactic hydrodynamics code based on a quasi-particle technique and making use of a mesh for force evaluation and sorting purposes is described. The short-range nature of the interparticle pressure forces, coupled with the use of a mesh allows a particularly fast algorithm. The 3D representation of the galaxy is mapped onto the ''3D'' main store of ICL DAP in a natural way, the 2 spatial dimensions in the plane of the galaxy becoming the 2 dimensions of the processor plane on the DAP and the third dimension varying within individual processor storage elements. This leads to a fairly straightforward implementation and a high degree of parallelism in the crucial parts of the code. The particle shuffling which is necessary after each timestep is facilitated by the use of a parallel variant of the bitonic sorting algorithm. Some results of simulations using a 63x63x16 mesh and about 50,000 particles to follow the evolution of a model disk galaxy are presented