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Welcome to the Cholla wiki!

Cholla is a static-mesh, GPU-native magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) simulation code that efficiently runs high-resolution simulations on massively-parallel computers. The code is written in a combination of C++, Cuda C, and HIP, and requires at least one NVIDIA or AMD GPU to run. Cholla was designed for astrophysics simulations, and the current release (3.0.0) includes the following physics:

• compressible hydrodynamics or ideal MHD in 1, 2, or 3 dimensions
• optically-thin radiative cooling and photoionization heating, including the option to use Cloudy cooling tables or the Grackle cooling library
• static gravity with user-defined functions
• FFT-based gas self-gravity
• particle-mesh based particle gravity
• cosmology
• passive scalar tracking

Cholla can be run using a variety of different numerical algorithms, allowing users to test the sensitivity of their results to the exact code configuration. Options include:

• Exact, Roe, HLLC, and HLLD Riemann solvers
• 2nd and 3rd order spatial reconstruction with limiting in either primitive or conserved variables
• a second order Van Leer integrator

Please cite the original code paper (Schneider & Robertson, 2015, ApJS) if you use Cholla for your research. Please also cite the cosmology paper (Villasenor et al. 2021, ApJ) if you use self-gravity or cosmology. Please cite the MHD paper (Caddy & Schneider 2024, ApJ submitted) if you use MHD. Additional pages in this wiki describe how to set up and run the code. Happy simulating!