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About Program Participants Accomodation Travel
 (City of Split) |
The MODEST-7a workshop, held in Split, Croatia, August 25-31, 2007,
was a not only a great success in terms of scientific output, but also
a historical meeting. It provided the first milestone along the road
to the construction of a software framework for simulations of dense
stellar systems.
The MODEST (for MOdeling DEnse STellar systems) initiative was started
five years ago, in 2002 with MODEST-1, in New York City (see
www.manybody.org/modest.html).
Since then we have had more
than twenty workshops, all focused on the challenge of simulating star
clusters and galactic nuclei on a star-by-star basis, in such a way as
to accurately describe the multi-scale, multi-physics characteristics
of these complex systems. To achieve that goal, existing codes for
stellar evolution, stellar dynamics and stellar hydrodynamics must be
coupled together to construct a flexible and robust joint software
environment, called MUSE (for Multiscale Multiphysics Scientific
Environment; see muse.li).
The objective of MODEST-7a was to construct a prototype of such a
software framework. Important steps had been taken over the last
two years at previous workshops, MODEST-6a (Lund, Sweden), MODEST-7d
(Amsterdam, the Netherlands), MODEST-7b (Philadelphia, USA), and
MODEST-7f (Amsterdam, the Netherlands), but prior to the Split
workshop we did not have a complete set of base codes with a full
interface to connect them. This goal was accomplished during the
seven days that we worked together in Split. The meeting format was
designed to bring together a group of twenty astrophysicists, spending
most of their time in hands-on mode writing computer codes for
incorporation into the MUSE framework, with some time set aside for
informal lectures on topics of mutual interest.
Having reached this first milestone, we will continue to develop the
MUSE environment within the MODEST initiative. While MUSE is expected
to grow significantly over the years, we will always remember that the
first fully working version was produced in Split, as part of the
Dalmatian Space Summer Program.
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