Verification of the time evolution of cosmological simulations via hypothesis-driven comparative and quantitative visualization

Abstract

We describe a visualization-assisted process for the verification of cosmological simulation codes. The need for code verification stems from the requirement for very accurate predictions in order to interpret observational data confidently. We compare different simulation algorithms in order to reliably predict differences in simulation results and understand their dependence on input parameter settings. Our verification process consists of the integration of iterative hypothesis-verification with comparative, feature and quantitative visualization. We validate this process by verifying the time evolution results of three different cosmology simulation codes. The purpose of this verification is to study the accuracy of AMR methods versus other N-body simulation methods for cosmological simulations.