List of cosmological computation software

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is the thermal radiation assumed to be left over from the "Big Bang" of cosmology. The CMB is a snapshot of the oldest light in our universe, imprinted on the sky when the universe was just 380,000 years old. It shows tiny temperature fluctuations that correspond to regions of slightly different densities, representing the seeds of all future structure: the stars and galaxies of today. Therefore, analysis of the small anisotropies in the CMB helps us to understand the origin and the fate of our universe. In past few decades, there has been a lot of improvement in the observations and several experiments, performed to understand the basic structure of the universe. For analyzing data of different cosmological experiments and for understanding the theoretical nature of the universe many advanced methods and computing software are developed in and used by Cosmologists for years. These software are widely used by the cosmologists across the globe.

The computational software, used in cosmology can be classified into the following major classes.

HEALPix (sometimes written as Healpix), an acronym for Hierarchical Equal Area isoLatitude Pixelisation of a 2-sphere, can refer to either an algorithm for pixelization of the 2-sphere, an associated software package, or an associated class of map projections. Healpix is widely used for cosmological random map generation. The original motivation for devising HEALPix was one of necessity. NASA's WMAP and the European Space Agency’s mission Planck - produce multi-frequency data sets sufficient for the construction of full-sky maps of the microwave sky at an angular resolution of a few arc minutes. The principal requirements in the development of HEALPix were to create a mathematical structure that supports a suitable discretization of functions on a sphere at sufficiently high resolution, and to facilitate fast and accurate statistical and astrophysical analysis of massive full-sky data sets. The HEALPix maps are used in almost all the data processing research in cosmology.

CMBFAST is a computer code, developed by Uroš Seljak and Matias Zaldarriaga (based on a Boltzmann code written by Edmund Bertschinger, Chung-Pei Ma and Paul Bode) for computing the power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background anisotropy. It is the first efficient program to do so, reducing the time taken to compute the anisotropy from several days to a few minutes by using a novel semi-analytic line-of-sight approach.

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