pyC2Ray

The pyC2Ray code is an updated version of the highly parallel ray-tracing and chemistry code C2Ray, which has been widely applied in simulations of cosmic reionisation. These simulations are computationally demanding, frequently consuming millions of CPU core-hours across thousands of nodes in high-performance computing (HPC) systems. The primary computational cost arises from determining the hydrogen column density along the trajectories of ionising photons. The updated pyC2Ray framework introduces the Accelerated Short-characteristics Octahedral Raytracing (ASORA) technique, which is a GPU-oriented ray-tracing algorithm designed to significantly improve performance. The method is implemented in C++/CUDA and integrated via a Python interface. This structure enables easy, customised use of the code while maintaining high computational efficiency.

simulation EoR — Simulation of the 21-cm differential brightness from the Epoch of Reionisation (20 > z > 6) to the Post-Reionisation era (z < 6). The animation centres on a residual neutral hydrogen cloud at z = 5.5, surrounded by ionising sources of varying luminosity. At lower redshift, most neutral hydrogen remains confined within dark matter halos (Giri and Bianco et al. (2024)).

Code Release and Documentation

If you are interested in installing the software, please follow the instructions
provided external page here. For tutorials, examples, modules, and more information about the contributors, visit external page this page.

If you come across any bugs or unusual behaviour in the code, please feel free to submit a external page GitHub issue. The issue page is also the best place to ask questions and share suggestions.

Publications

This code was originally created by Patrick Hirling (see his external page GitHub) for a master’s astrophysics workshop under Michele Bianco at EPFL, and is described in the associated paper external page Hirling and Bianco et al. (2023). If you use this code in a scientific publication, please acknowledge it by citing the paper.