Parallelisation of Kira

In this report we describe the parallelisation of kira, a program from the Starlab package (http://www.ids.ias.edu/~starlab/). In this program the evolution in time of a collection of stars is calculated, using gravitational forces between the stars. All gravitational interactions are explicitly taken into account, therefore the program uses large amounts of cpu-time. To speed up the program, usage is made of GRAPE hardware. The goal of this project is to parallelise the program in order to reduce the wall clock time needed for a simulation in a GRAPE-less environment. However, the usage of GRAPE hardware was taken into account for future versions of the parallel version. The parallelisation was done under supervision of Simon Portegies-Zwart (University of Amsterdam) and granted by NCF grant 2003.01.