Introduction

Hello, and welcome to the first public release of the StarCrash SPH-based parallel hydro code, developed and maintained by Joshua Faber, James Lombardi, and Fred Rasio. We hope this instruction manual will allow you to make the most effective use of our code.

In the sections below, you will find installation instructions, a description of the various parts of the code, starting with the theory behind SPH, continuing on to the techniques we have added to our code involving both parallelization and various physical effects, and concluding with a guide explaining how to use the code properly, as well as to add your own routines.

While this code is being freely distributed, we ask that you please give appropriate credit to those who have spent a great deal of time developing it. If you are going to publish work done with this code, please see Sec. 8 for the proper references to cite, as well as the license agreement we are using, the rather ubiquitous Gnu General Public License (GPL).