SEREN is an astrophysical Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics code designed to investigate star and planet formation problems using self-gravitating hydrodynamics simulations of molecular clouds, star-forming cores, and protostellar disks.

SEREN is written in Fortran 95/2003 with a modular philosophy for adding features into the code. Each feature can be easily activated or deactivated by way of setting options in the Makefile before compiling the code. This has the added benefit of allowing unwanted features to be removed at the compilation stage resulting in a smaller and faster executable program. SEREN is written with OpenMP directives to allow parallelization on shared-memory architecture.

PDFchem models the cold ISM at moderate and large scales using functions connecting the quantities of the local and the observed visual extinctions and the local number density with probability density functions. For any given observed visual extinction sampled with thousands of clouds, the algorithm instantly computes the average abundances of the most important species and performs radiative transfer calculations to estimate the average emission of the most commonly observed lines.