An accurate tool for the fast generation of dark matter halo catalogs

Understand

We present a new parallel implementation of the PINpointing Orbit Crossing-Collapsed HIerarchical Objects (PINOCCHIO) algorithm, a quick tool, based on Lagrangian Perturbation Theory, for the hierarchical build-up of Dark Matter halos in cosmological volumes.

• To assess its ability to predict halo correlations on large scales, we compare its results with those of an N-body simulation of a 3 Gpc/h box sampled with 2048^3 particles taken from the MICE suite, matching the same seeds for the initial conditions.
• Thanks to the FFTW libraries and to the relatively simple design, the code shows very good scaling properties.
• The CPU time required by PINOCCHIO is a tiny fraction (~1/2000) of that required by the MICE simulation.