Mercury-Ar$χ$es: a high-performance n-body code for planet formation studies

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Hauptverfasser: Turrini, Diego, Fonte, Sergio, Politi, Romolo, Polychroni, Danae, Liu, Scigé J., Simonetti, Paolo Matteo, Pirani, Simona
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Turrini, Diego
Fonte, Sergio
Politi, Romolo
Polychroni, Danae
Liu, Scigé J.
Simonetti, Paolo Matteo
Pirani, Simona
author_facet Turrini, Diego
Fonte, Sergio
Politi, Romolo
Polychroni, Danae
Liu, Scigé J.
Simonetti, Paolo Matteo
Pirani, Simona
contents Forming planetary systems are populated by large numbers of gravitationally interacting planetary bodies, spanning from massive giant planets to small planetesimals akin to present-day asteroids and comets. All these planetary bodies are embedded in the gaseous embrace of their native protoplanetary disks, and their interactions with the disk gas play a central role in shaping their dynamical evolution and the outcomes of planet formation. These factors make realistic planet formation simulations extremely computationally demanding, which in turn means that accurately modeling the formation of planetary systems requires the use of high-performance methods. The planet formation code Mercury-Ar$χ$es was developed to address these challenges and, since its first implementation, has been used in multiple exoplanetary and Solar System studies. Mercury-Ar$χ$es is a parallel n-body code that builds on the widely used Mercury code and is capable of modeling the growth and migration of forming planets, the interactions between planetary bodies and the disk gas, as well as the evolving impact flux of planetesimals on forming planets across the different stages of their formation process. In this work we provide the up-to-date overview of its physical modeling capabilities and the first detailed description of its high-performance implementation based on the OpenMP directive-based parallelism for shared memory environments, to harness the multi-thread and vectorization features of modern processor architectures.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_16791
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mercury-Ar$χ$es: a high-performance n-body code for planet formation studies
Turrini, Diego
Fonte, Sergio
Politi, Romolo
Polychroni, Danae
Liu, Scigé J.
Simonetti, Paolo Matteo
Pirani, Simona
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Computational Physics
Forming planetary systems are populated by large numbers of gravitationally interacting planetary bodies, spanning from massive giant planets to small planetesimals akin to present-day asteroids and comets. All these planetary bodies are embedded in the gaseous embrace of their native protoplanetary disks, and their interactions with the disk gas play a central role in shaping their dynamical evolution and the outcomes of planet formation. These factors make realistic planet formation simulations extremely computationally demanding, which in turn means that accurately modeling the formation of planetary systems requires the use of high-performance methods. The planet formation code Mercury-Ar$χ$es was developed to address these challenges and, since its first implementation, has been used in multiple exoplanetary and Solar System studies. Mercury-Ar$χ$es is a parallel n-body code that builds on the widely used Mercury code and is capable of modeling the growth and migration of forming planets, the interactions between planetary bodies and the disk gas, as well as the evolving impact flux of planetesimals on forming planets across the different stages of their formation process. In this work we provide the up-to-date overview of its physical modeling capabilities and the first detailed description of its high-performance implementation based on the OpenMP directive-based parallelism for shared memory environments, to harness the multi-thread and vectorization features of modern processor architectures.
title Mercury-Ar$χ$es: a high-performance n-body code for planet formation studies
topic Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Computational Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16791