Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is a Lagrangian particle method that approximates a continuous fluid as discrete nodes, each carrying various parameters such as mass, position, velocity, pressure, and temperature. In an SPH simulation the resolution scales with the particle density; StarSmasher is able to handle both equal-mass and equal number-density particle models. StarSmasher solves for hydro forces by calculating the pressure for each particle as a function of the particle's properties - density, internal energy, and internal properties (e.g. temperature and mean molecular weight). The code implements variational equations of motion and libraries to calculate the gravitational forces between particles using direct summation on NVIDIA graphics cards. Using a direct summation instead of a tree-based algorithm for gravity increases the accuracy of the gravity calculations at the cost of speed. The code uses a cubic spline for the smoothing kernel and an artificial viscosity prescription coupled with a Balsara Switch to prevent unphysical interparticle penetration. The code also implements an artificial relaxation force to the equations of motion to add a drag term to the calculated accelerations during relaxation integrations. Initially called StarCrash, StarSmasher was developed originally by Rasio.

CMC-COSMIC models dense star clusters using Hénon's method using orbit-averaging collisional stellar dynamics. It includes all the relevant physics for modeling dense spherical star clusters, such as strong dynamical encounters, single and binary stellar evolution, central massive black holes, three-body binary formation, and relativistic dynamics, among others. CMC is parallelized using the Message Passing Interface (MPI), and is pinned to the COSMIC (ascl:2108.022) package for binary population synthesis, which itself was originally based on the version of BSE (ascl:1303.014). COSMIC is currently a submodule within CMC, ensuring that any cluster simulations or binary populations are integrated with the same physics.

COSMIC (Compact Object Synthesis and Monte Carlo Investigation Code) generates synthetic populations with an adaptive size based on how the shape of binary parameter distributions change as the number of simulated binaries increases. It implements stellar evolution using SSE (ascl:1303.015) and binary interactions using BSE (ascl:1303.014). COSMIC can also be used to simulate a single binary at a time, a list of multiple binaries, a grid of binaries, or a fixed population size as well as restart binaries at a mid point in their evolution. The code is included in CMC-COSMIC (ascl:2108.023).