Computer Simulations of Planet Collisions Using a New Parallel Algorithm

New deterministic computer simulations have been developed for studying the dynamics of large objects colliding. For various initial conditions the system may clump together forming a new object or may rotate, causing ejecta to leave the primary mass in a pattern sustaining only a short number of orbits, but promising of satellite formation. Bodies without a large central mass are not able to form a cohesive object, and fly apart upon impact. A rudimentary scaling study when the code is parallelized using a force-decomposition scheme suggests that the computational time scales inversely as the number of processors when less than four are involved and the gains are somewhat less pronounced as the number of processors increases.