Cholla (Computational Hydrodynamics on ii Architectures)

Cholla is a GPU-based hydrodynamics code I developed as part of my thesis work at the University of Arizona. It was designed to be massively-parallel and extremely efficient, and has been run on some of the largest supercomputers in the world. I am committed to keeping Cholla free and open-source. The most recent public release of the code can be found on GitHub here.

Current features of Cholla include:

  • Fully native NVIDIA GPU support

  • 1st, 2nd, and 3rd order spatial reconstruction, including reconstruction in the primitive or characteristic variables

  • Exact, Roe, and HLLC Riemann Solvers

  • CTU and Van Leer Integrators

  • Static gravity

  • FFT-based self gravity

  • Particles

  • MPI multi-node parallelization (run on thousands of GPUs!)

  • A comprehensive suite of test calculations designed to get new users up and running

  • HDF5 data outputs

  • Slice and projection outputs

  • Optically-thin radiative heating / cooling

  • Advected scalar fields

  • Cosmology

A number of additional features are currently under development and/or testing, and will be added to the public repository soon. These include:

  • Magnetohydrodynamics

  • Radiative Transfer (Optically-thin Variable Eddington Tensor)

  • Dust modeling

  • Integrated in-situ visualizations