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News:

Jul 15th 2009:
v1.12.2 released.

Apr 20th 2009:
v1.12.1 released.

Dec 22nd 2008:
v1.12.0 released. Merry Christmas!

Oct 13th 2008:
v1.11.1 released. Recommended for all users!

Oct 13th 2008:
SPLASH mailing lists started (as Google Groups).

Sep 3rd 2008:
New SPLASH website launched.

Sep 1st 2008:
Arrived in Melbourne!

more »

Current Status

The currently released version is 1.12.2 (15th Jul 2009) (click to see downloadable files). For a brief description of new features see the version history in the userguide. For a complete list of changes since previous versions see the change log.

Documentation (user guide):

The SPLASH userguide may be downloaded as a pdf, or by browsing the html version.

There is also a paper (click for pdf) describing the basic algorithms implemented in SPLASH, which should be cited whenever you use SPLASH for scientific purposes (cite as Price, 2007, Publ. Astron. Soc. Aust., 24, 159-173).

Latest News

15/07/09: v1.12.2 released.

This is a minor release, main things are as follows:

» news archive

About

SPLASH (formerly SUPERSPHPLOT) is a (free!) visualisation tool for output from (astrophysical) simulations using the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method in one, two and three dimensions. It is written in Fortran 90 and utilises the PGPLOT graphics subroutine library to do the actual plotting. It is based around a command-line menu structure but utilises the interactive capabilities of PGPLOT to manipulate data interactively in the plotting window.

SPLASH is a fully interactive program which means that visualisations can be changed rapidly at the touch of a button (e.g. zooming, rotating, shifting cross section positions etc). Data is read *directly* from the code dump format giving rapid access to results and the visualisation is advanced forwards and backwards through timesteps by single keystrokes.

SPLASH uses the SPH kernel to render plots of not only density but other physical quantities, giving a smooth representation of the data. My goal is to eliminate the publication of crap-looking particle plots from SPH codes!

Features:

Examples of plots produced with SPLASH can be found in the gallery or by looking at papers with figures produced using splash.

Requirements

SPLASH is written in Fortran 90/95 and uses the PGPLOT graphics subroutine library which is available for download from http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~tjp/pgplot/. The PGPLOT libraries are often already installed in many Astronomy departments.

The free and open source g95 or gfortran compilers can be used to compile both PGPLOT and SPLASH. These days I'd have to say I recommend gfortran for speed (plus in principle it has openMP though I have never found it to work properly).

Frequently Asked Questions:

Some answers to frequently asked questions (including troubleshooting related to installation problems) are given here.