Shark: introducing an open source, free and flexible semi-analytic model of galaxy formation

Understand

We present a new, open source, free semi-analytic model (SAM) of galaxy formation, Shark, designed to be highly flexible and modular, allowing easy exploration of different physical processes and ways of modelling them.

• We introduce the philosophy behind Shark and provide an overview of the physical processes included in the model.
• Shark is written in C++11 and has been parallelized with OpenMP.
• In the released version (v1.1), we implement several different models for gas cooling, active galactic nuclei, stellar and photo-ionisation feedback, and star formation (SF).