PINOCCHIO generates catalogues of cosmological dark matter halos with known mass, position, velocity and merger history. It is able to reproduce, with very good accuracy, the hierarchical formation of dark matter halos from a realization of an initial (linear) density perturbation field, given on a 3D grid. Its setup is similar to that of a conventional N-body simulation, but it is based on the powerful Lagrangian Perturbation Theory. It runs in just a small fraction of the computing time taken by an equivalent N-body simulation, producing promptly the merging histories of all halos in the catalog.

URCHIN is a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) reverse ray tracer (i.e. from particles to sources). It calculates the amount of shielding from a uniform background that each particle experiences. Preservation of the adaptive density field resolution present in many gas dynamics codes and uniform sampling of gas resolution elements with rays are two of the benefits of URCHIN; it also offers preservation of Galilean invariance, high spectral resolution, and preservation of the standard uniform UV background in optically thin gas.