We present results of cosmological simulations of disk galaxies carried out with the GADGET-3 TreePM+SPH code, where star formation and stellar feedback are described using our MUlti Phase Particle Integrator (MUPPI) model. This description is based on a simple multi-phase model of the interstellar medium at unresolved scales, where mass and energy flows among the components are explicitly followed by solving a system of ordinary differential equations. Thermal energy from SNe is injected into the local hot phase, so as to avoid that it is promptly radiated away. A kinetic feedback prescription generates the massive outflows needed to avoid the over-production of stars. We use two sets of zoomed-in initial conditions of isolated cosmological halos with masses (2 − 3) · 10 12 M ⊙ , both available at several resolution levels. In all cases we obtain spiral galaxies with small bulge-over-total stellar mass ratios (B/T ∼ 0.2), extended stellar and gas disks, flat rotation curves and realistic values of stellar masses. Gas profiles are relatively flat, molecular gas is found to dominate at the centre of galaxies, with star formation rates following the observed Schmidt-Kennicutt relation. Stars kinematically belonging to the bulge form early, while disk stars show a clear inside-out formation pattern and mostly form after redshift z = 2. However, the baryon conversion efficiencies in our simulations differ from the relation given by Moster et al. (2010) at a 3σ level, thus indicating that our stellar disks are still too massive for the Dark Matter halo in which they reside. Results are found to be remarkably stable against resolution. This further demonstrates the feasibility of carrying out simulations producing a realistic population of galaxies within representative cosmological volumes, at a relatively modest resolution.

We present a quantification of the properties of bars in two N-body+SPH cosmological simulations of spiral galaxies, named GA and AqC. The initial conditions were obtained using the zoom-in technique and represent two dark matter (DM) halos of 2−3×10 12 M ⊙ , available at two different resolutions. The resulting galaxies are presented in the companion paper of Murante et al. (2014). We find that the GA galaxy has a bar of length 8.8 kpc, present at the two resolution levels even though with a slightly different strength. Classical bar signatures (e.g. pattern of streaming motions, high m = 2 Fourier mode with roughly constant phase) are consistently found at both resolutions. Though a close encounter with a merging satellite at z ∼ 0.6 (mass ratio 1 : 50) causes a strong, transient spiral pattern and some heating of the disk, we find that bar instability is due to secular process, caused by a low Toomre parameter Q 1 due to accumulation of mass in the disk. The AqC galaxy has a slightly different history: it suffers a similar tidal disturbance due to a merging satellite at z ∼ 0.5 but with a mass ratio of 1 : 32, that triggers a bar in the high-resolution simulation, while at low resolution the merging is found to take place at a later time, so that both secular evolution and merging are plausible triggers for bar instability.

We present predictions of Spectral Energy Distributions (SEDs), from the UV to the FIR, of simulated galaxies at z = 0. These were obtained by post-processing the results of an N-body+hydro simulation of a small cosmological volume, that uses the Multi-Phase Particle Integrator (MUPPI) for star formation and stellar feedback, with the GRASIL-3D radiative transfer code, that includes reprocessing of UV light by dust. Physical properties of galaxies resemble observed ones, though with some tension at small and large stellar masses. Comparing predicted SEDs of simulated galaxies with different samples of local galaxies, we find that these resemble observed ones, when normalised at 3.6 µm. A comparison with the Herschel Reference Survey shows that, when binning galaxies in Star Formation Rate (SFR), average SEDs are reproduced to within a factor of ∼ 2 even in normalization, while binning in stellar mass highlights the same tension that is present in the stellar mass -SFR plane. We use our sample to investigate the correlation of IR luminosity in Spitzer and Herschel bands with several galaxy properties. SFR is the quantity that best correlates with IR light up to 160 µm, while at longer wavelengths better correlations are found with molecular mass and, at 500 µm, with dust mass. However, using the position of the FIR peak as a proxy for cold dust temperature, we assess that heating of cold dust is mostly determined by SFR, with stellar mass giving only a minor contribution. We finally show how our sample of simulated galaxies can be used as a guide to understand the physical properties and selection biases of observed samples.

This work arises on the environment of the ExaNeSt project aiming at design and development of an exascale ready supercomputer with low energy consumption profile but able to support the most demanding scientific and technical applications. The ExaNeSt compute unit consists of densely-packed low-power 64-bit ARM processors, embedded within Xilinx FPGA SoCs. SoC boards are heterogeneous architecture where computing power is supplied both by CPUs and GPUs, and are emerging as a possible low-power and low-cost alternative to clusters based on traditional CPUs. A state-of-the-art direct N -body code suitable for astrophysical simulations has been re-engineered in order to exploit SoC heterogeneous platforms based on ARM CPUs and embedded GPUs. Performance tests show that embedded GPUs can be effectively used to accelerate reallife scientific calculations, and that are promising also because of their energy efficiency, which is a crucial design in future exascale platforms.

New challenges in Astronomy and Astrophysics (AA) are urging the need for a large number of exceptionally computationally intensive simulations. "Exascale" (and beyond) computational facilities are mandatory to address the size of theoretical problems and data coming from the new generation of observational facilities in AA. Currently, the High Performance Computing (HPC) sector is undergoing a profound phase of innovation, in which the primary challenge to the achievement of the "Exascale" is the power-consumption. The goal of this work is to give some insights about performance and energy footprint of contemporary architectures with a real astrophysical application in an HPC context. We use a state-of-theart N-body application that we re-engineered and optimized to exploit the heterogeneous underlying hardware fully. We quantitatively evaluate the impact of computation on energy consumption when running on four different platforms. Two of them represent the current HPC systems (Intel-based and equipped with NVIDIA GPUs), one is a micro-cluster based on ARM-MPSoC, and one is a "prototype towards Exascale" equipped with ARM-MPSoCs tightly coupled with FPGAs. We investigate the behaviour of the different devices where the high-end GPUs excel in terms of time-to-solution while MPSoC-FPGA systems outperform GPUs in power consumption. Our experience reveals that considering FPGAs for computationally intensive application seems very promising, as their performance is improving to meet the requirements of scientific applications. This work can be a reference for future platforms development for astrophysics applications where computationally intensive calculations are required.