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Overview

Thor is a GPU-accelerated framework for synthetic observations and post-processing of galaxy formation simulations.

  • High-Fidelity Synthetic Observations

    Mock stellar and gas emission and absorption from cosmological simulations, including resonant emission line radiative transfer.

  • Run Anywhere

    Runs on arbitrary CPUs and GPUs via SYCL. Pre-built containers deploy from laptops to HPC clusters.

  • Broad Compatibility

    Supports native data structures from most galaxy formation codes as well as analytical geometries for idealized studies.

  • Modular by Design

    Built to handle complex rendering, spatial analyses, sampling, and other simulation post-processing tasks — extensible as needed.

Citing Thor

If you use Thor in your research, please cite the following paper:

Byrohl, C. & Nelson, D. (2025). THOR: a GPU-accelerated and MPI-parallel radiative transfer code. arXiv:2507.11603. ADS | arXiv

For a list of papers using Thor and its predecessor codes (voroILTIS, ILTIS), see Papers.

BibTeX 
@ARTICLE{2025arXiv250711603B,
       author = {{Byrohl}, Chris and {Nelson}, Dylan},
        title = "{THOR: a GPU-accelerated and MPI-parallel radiative transfer code}",
      journal = {arXiv e-prints},
     keywords = {Astrophysics of Galaxies, Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics},
         year = 2025,
        month = jul,
          eid = {arXiv:2507.11603},
        pages = {arXiv:2507.11603},
          doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2507.11603},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
       eprint = {2507.11603},
 primaryClass = {astro-ph.GA},
       adsurl = {https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025arXiv250711603B},
      adsnote = {Provided by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System}
}