Advances in Computational Astrophysics: Methods, Tools, and Outcome

This book contains the proceedings of a conference, held on 13-17 June 2011 in Cefalu' (Sicily, Italy) to discuss the recent progress in the application of modern numerical tools to the solution of open problems in astrophysics, from star formation up to the large scale structure of the universe. This conference was the sixth in a series of Astronomy and Astrophysics workshops and conferences held in Cefalu' in the past years, and devoted to hot topics over the whole fields of modern Astrophysics. This conference was a little different from many others where the accent was put on the computational part of scientific work related to astrophysics. Actually, more than dealing with deep numerical and computational aspects in a specific subfield of astrophysics or cosmology, we intended to gather scientists who are contemporarily at top of their fields on both the scientific side and that of numerical and computational methods, techniques, showing also expertise in the use of modern hardware and software resources. The content of the book is divided into various Parts, from I to X, any of them referring to a specific topic of astrophysics where important achievements are presented after some introduction to the topic. In particular, Parts V and X are specifically devoted to Advanced tools in computational astrophysics and to New Technologies in computational astrophysics, respectively. A total of about 65 articles are presented here, with a length ranging from the 4 pages of the normal contributed papers to the 8 pages of the invited talks and the 10 pages of the introductory reviews. The eleventh Part is dedicated to the summaries of the many poster contributions presented at the conference. The conference resulted as a success, thanks to the high level of the oral and poster presentations and to the huge number of participants from many countries. In particular, we cite the vast participation of graduate students and young post docs, who contributed to the meeting also thanks to their ample participation to the debate after each talk.