The Big MultiDark Planck simulation belongs to the series of MultiDark simulations with Planck cosmology. It is kin to the MDPL2 simulation, with the same cosmological parameters and particle number, but a larger box size.
The Bolshoi simulation (from Russian “big”) has a simulation volume of (250 Mpc/h)3 and a mass resolution of 1.35 * 108 Msun/h, which is more than a factor of 6 better than the mass resolution of the Millennium simulation. Its details are described in Klypin, Trujillo-Gomez & Primack 2010, some more information and images can be found at the Bolshoi simulation homepage. The main properties and cosmological parameters are listed in the table below; it uses the same WMAP5 cosmology as the MultiDark simulation MDR1.
The BolshoiP simulation belongs to the BolshoiP Project and is kin to the Bolshoi simulation. It has the same simulation volume of (250 Mpc/h)3 and a mass resolution of 1.35 * 108 Msun/h, but is based on the Planck cosmology.
The Huge MultiDark Planck simulation belongs to the series of MultiDark simulations with Planck cosmology. It is kin to the MDPL2 simulation, with the same cosmological parameters and particle number, but a larger box size (4 Gpc/h).
The MDPL simulation was performed with the same (1 Gpc/h)3 box size as MDR1, but with more than 6 times higher mass resolution, using nearly 57 billion particles in a cosmology that is consistent with the Planck data (2013). It was performed using the L-Gadget2 code. Some details can be found in Klypin et al. 2014.
The MultiDark Planck 2 simulation belongs to the series of MultiDark simulations with Planck cosmology. It is kin to the MDPL simulation, with the same box size, cosmological parameters and particle resolution, but a different initial seed. If you are in doubt whether to use MDPL or MDPL2, we recommend to use MDPL2, since there will be more data products available for this simulation in the future (e.g. Rockstar-catalogues).
MDR1 is the first MultiDark simulation, performed in 2010. A detailed description is available in the paper Prada et al. 2011. This simulation contains about 8.6 billion particles in a (1 Gpc/h)3 cube and thus has a larger volume than the Millennium Simulation, using the more up-to-date WMAP5 cosmology.
The Small MultiDark Planck simulation belongs to the series of MultiDark simulations with Planck cosmology. Its simulation box has a side length of only 400 Mpc/h, less than half of the MDPL-size. With 38403 particles inside this small box it achieves a mass resolution of 108 Msun/h per dark matter particle. Some more details for this simulation are described in Klypin et al. 2014.
The Very Small MultiDark Planck simulation (VSMDPL) belongs to the series of MultiDark simulations with Planck cosmology. It has the same cosmological parameters and particle number as MDPL2, but a much smaller box size of 160 Mpc/h, leading to a higher mass resolution.
The Extremely Small MultiDark Planck simulation (ESMDPL) belongs to the series of MultiDark simulations with Planck cosmology. It has a box size of 64 Mpc/h simulated with 2048^3 as well as with 4096^3 particles, leading to the highest mass resolution of the MultiDark simulation set. ESMDPL is a constrained simulation based on Cosmicflows-2 observational data (see Ocvirk et al., MNRAS 496, 4087 (2020), Sorce et al. MNRAS 515, 2970 (2022) for a description of the constrained initial conditions).
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