This software package provides tools to simulate gravitational lensing using two different techniques, ray tracing and shear calculation. This software was originally developed as part of my doctoral dissertation (http://thesis.davecoss.com).
Since I finished my dissertation (May 2010), I have continued to work on this software. In fact, it is still a work in progress, which mostly means adding features. Currently, this includes improving the parallel performance of ray_trace_ellipse and improving the script-ability of physcalc.
ray_trace_ellipse is a program that calculations deflection angles on a grid for light passing may a deflecting mass distribution. Using MPI, ray_trace_ellipse may calculate deflection in parallel across network connected computers, such as cluster.
Gravitational Lensing Shear is calculated using the relationship of convergence and shear, described by a set of coupled partial differential equations. This is done using the program physcalc.
This software suite requires two libraries that I developed in parallel to this work, which are also available under the GNU GPL.
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libdnstd is a general purpose C++ library that provides various utility functions and classes, generally mathematically focused. This may be found at https://github.com/kd0kfo/libdnstd.git.
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libmygl is a C++ library that provides subroutines and classes to carry out gravitational lensing simulations. This library is located at https://github.com/kd0kfo/libmygl.git.
Additionally, as of version 2.10, this software stored Planes as NetCDF files. This is freely available here: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/
physcalc requires Flex and Bison. They can be found at http://flex.sourceforge.net/ and http://www.gnu.org/software/bison/ respectively.
Please cite use of this software or derivatives of this software as: Coss, D., "Weak Shear Study of Galaxy Clusters by Simulated Gravitational Lensing.", Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Missouri -- St Louis, 2010.
This software is available under the GNU General Public License version 3 (see COPYING).