MLAPM simulates structure formation from collisionless matter. The code, written in C, is purely grid-based and uses a recursively refined Cartesian grid to solve Poisson's equation for the potential, rather than obtaining the potential from a Green's function. Refinements can have arbitrary shapes and in practice closely follow the complex morphology of the density field that evolves. The timestep shortens by a factor two with each successive refinement. It is argued that an appropriate choice of softening length is of great importance and that the softening should be at all points an appropriate multiple of the local inter-particle separation. Unlike tree and P3M codes, multigrid codes automatically satisfy this requirement.

We present here a fast code for creating a synthetic survey of the Milky Way. Given one or more color-magnitude bounds, a survey size and geometry, the code returns a catalog of stars in accordance with a given model of the Milky Way. The model can be specified by a set of density distributions or as an N-body realization. We provide fast and efficient algorithms for sampling both types of models. As compared to earlier sampling schemes which generate stars at specified locations along a line of sight, our scheme can generate a continuous and smooth distribution of stars over any given volume. The code is quite general and flexible and can accept input in the form of a star formation rate, age metallicity relation, age velocity dispersion relation and analytic density distribution functions. Theoretical isochrones are then used to generate a catalog of stars and support is available for a wide range of photometric bands. As a concrete example we implement the Besancon Milky Way model for the disc. For the stellar halo we employ the simulated stellar halo N-body models of Bullock & Johnston (2005). In order to sample N-body models, we present a scheme that disperses the stars spawned by an N-body particle, in such a way that the phase space density of the spawned stars is consistent with that of the N-body particles. The code is ideally suited to generating synthetic data sets that mimic near future wide area surveys such as GAIA, LSST and HERMES. As an application we study the prospect of identifying structures in the stellar halo with a simulated GAIA survey.

TM (Torus Mapper) produces models for orbits in action-angle coordinates in axisymmetric potentials using torus mapping, a non-perturbative technique for creating orbital tori for specified values of the action integrals. It can compute a star's position at any time given an orbital torus and a star’s position at a reference time, and also provides a way to choose initial conditions for N-body simulations of realistic disc galaxies that start in perfect equilibrium. TM provides some advantages over use of a standard time-stepper to create orbits.

The Action Computation Tool (TACT) tests methods for estimating actions, angles and frequencies of orbits in both axisymmetric and triaxial potentials, including general spherical potentials, analytic potentials (Isochrone and Harmonic oscillator), axisymmetric Stackel fudge, average generating function from orbit (AvGF), and others. It is written in C++; code is provided to compile the routines into a Python library. TM (ascl:1512.014) and LAPACK are required to access some features.