Development and Astrophysical Applications of a Parallel Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Code with MPI

Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is a particle method to simulate compressible fluids. First we present a brief introduction to SPH, where we focus on an approach to treat the physical viscosity. Then we describe in detail the basic principles of our parallel implementation of the SPH method. The efficiency of the code on Cray T3E and IBM SP2 is discussed. In the last part we present a short introduction to accretion disks in interacting binary stars and report on some new results in that field achieved with our code.