Historical Development

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The efforts of theoretical and computational astrophysics in ASIAA date back to the CFD-MHD initiative, established in 2000 as a Key Project of the Academia Sinica. The CFD-MHD initiative started as a joint research project of the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA), the Institute of Mathematics (ASIM) of the Academia Sinica, and the Department of Mathematics of the National Taiwan University. Its main goal was to develop high-performance codes of computational fluid dynamics and magnetohydrodynamics (CFD-MHD) for astrophysical problems. Built upon Prof. Chi Yuan’s vision, the first grass-root solver for astrophysical fluid in Taiwan, Antares, was made with the 2nd-order Godunov scheme with exact/approximate Riemann solvers.

The name of CFD-MHD was changed to CompAS in February 2012 for “Computational Astrophysics” to generalize scopes into the broad context of computational astrophysics for the growing diversity of participants in the institute. Applications of the Antares suites of codes include the structure and evolution of gas disks in spiral galaxies, planet migration in protoplanetary disks, planet-disk interactions, and the formation of circumplanetary disks.

For an even bigger horizon in the new high-performance computing era, the transformed CompAS (Computational Astrophysical Sciences) continues to thrive and build upon the founding CFD-MHD effort in fundamental code and algorithm development for theoretical and computational astrophysics. Since the inception of the first flagship 2D Antares code in the early 2000s’, CompAS has not only been able to advance on algorithm development but also been the key incubator for several new platforms of different designs. The ongoing efforts are staying at the forefront of numerical algorithms and technologies of scientific computation.