"From Star Clusters to Galaxy Formation - The Virtual Universe"

Galactic astrophysical research is facing the challenge of a wealth of new observational data and the emergence of ever more powerful modelling techniques. For example, the launch of ESA's space mission Gaia is scheduled for the year 2012, which is expected to yield an unprecedented amount of accurate astrometric and physical data for a huge number of stars. In addition, we mention RAVE, SDSS, PanSTARRS, and the Herschel Space Observatory. Fully harvesting this information will also require novel theoretical approaches. It therefore is timely to bring together scientists interested in simulations that cover the broad range from star clusters, disc dynamics, central black holes, or sinking satellites, to galaxy formation in a cosmological context. The numerical methods discussed in the splinter meeting may include N-body integration, SPH and hydrodynamical codes, particle-mesh techniques, and other procedures, as well as hardware and software co-evolution.

Special emphasis is placed in this workshop to present cutting edge results obtained on novel computing architectures, used for computational astrophysics and dynamics. In recent years general purpose computing on many-core accelerator boards (in practise in most cases GPU cards, graphical processing units) has changed the supercomputing landscape. A single GPU connected with a standard personal computer yields Teraflop scale parallel computing capacity, which few years ago was the exclusive domain of big and expensive supercomputers. The fastest computer in the world according to the Top500 list is a cluster using thousands of GPU for accelerating computations. New parallel programming methods have to be employed. Computational astrophysics is one of the pioneers in the field; in our workshop we want to bring together theoretical astronomers, special supercomputing experts, and those who are already working in the crossroads between the fields.