The effects of stochasticity on the luminosities of stellar populations are an often neglected but crucial element for understanding populations in the low mass or low star formation rate regime. To address this issue, we present SLUG, a new code to "Stochastically Light Up Galaxies". SLUG synthesizes stellar populations using a Monte Carlo technique that treats stochastic sampling properly including the effects of clustering, the stellar initial mass function, star formation history, stellar evolution, and cluster disruption. This code produces many useful outputs, including i) catalogs of star clusters and their properties, such as their stellar initial mass distributions and their photometric properties in a variety of filters, ii) two dimensional histograms of color-magnitude diagrams of every star in the simulation, iii) and the photometric properties of field stars and the integrated photometry of the entire simulated galaxy. After presenting the SLUG algorithm in detail, we validate the code through comparisons with starburst99 in the well-sampled regime, and with observed photometry of Milky Way clusters. Finally, we demonstrate the SLUG's capabilities by presenting outputs in the stochastic regime.

Observations of disk galaxies at z~2 have demonstrated that turbulence driven by gravitational instability can dominate the energetics of the disk. GIDGET is a 1D simulation code, which we have made publicly available, that economically evolves these galaxies from z~2 to z~0 on a single CPU in a matter of minutes, tracking column density, metallicity, and velocity dispersions of gaseous and multiple stellar components. We include an H$_2$ regulated star formation law and the effects of stellar heating by transient spiral structure. We use this code to demonstrate a possible explanation for the existence of a thin and thick disk stellar population and the age-velocity dispersion correlation of stars in the solar neighborhood: the high velocity dispersion of gas in disks at z~2 decreases along with the cosmological accretion rate, while at lower redshift, the dynamically colder gas forms the low velocity dispersion stars of the thin disk.

DESPOTIC (Derive the Energetics and SPectra of Optically Thick Interstellar Clouds), written in Python, represents optically thick interstellar clouds using a one-zone model and calculates line luminosities, line cooling rates, and in restricted cases line profiles using an escape probability formalism. DESPOTIC calculates clouds' equilibrium gas and dust temperatures and their time-dependent thermal evolution. The code allows rapid and interactive calculation of clouds' characteristic temperatures, identification of their dominant heating and cooling mechanisms, and prediction of their observable spectra across a wide range of interstellar environments.

VADER is a flexible, general code that simulates the time evolution of thin axisymmetric accretion disks in time-steady potentials. VADER handles arbitrary viscosities, equations of state, boundary conditions, and source and sink terms for both mass and energy.

CLOC computes cluster order statistics, i.e. the luminosity distribution of the Nth most luminous cluster in a population. It is flexible and requires few assumptions, allowing for parametrized variations in the initial cluster mass function and its upper and lower cutoffs, variations in the cluster age distribution, stellar evolution and dust extinction, as well as observational uncertainties in both the properties of star clusters and their underlying host galaxies. It uses Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to search parameter space to find best-fitting values for the parameters describing cluster formation and disruption, and to obtain rigorous confidence intervals on the inferred values.

Atmospheric Athena simulates hydrodynamic escape from close-in giant planets in 3D. It uses the Athena hydrodynamics code (ascl:1010.014) with a new ionizing radiative transfer implementation to self-consistently model photoionization driven winds from the planet. The code is fully compatible with static mesh refinement and MPI parallelization and can handle arbitrary planet potentials and stellar initial conditions.

Quokka is a two-moment radiation hydrodynamics code that uses the piecewise-parabolic method, with AMR and subcycling in time. It runs on CPUs (MPI+vectorized) or NVIDIA GPUs (MPI+CUDA) with a single-source codebase. The hydrodynamics solver is an unsplit method, using the piecewise parabolic method for reconstruction in the primitive variables, the HLLC Riemann solver for flux computations, and a method-of-lines formulation for the time integration. The order of reconstruction is reduced in zones where shocks are detected in order to suppress spurious oscillations in strong shocks. Quokka's radiation hydrodynamics formulation is based on the mixed-frame moment equations. The radiation subsystem is coupled to the hydrodynamic subsystem via operator splitting, with the hydrodynamic update computed first, followed by the radiation update, with the latter update including the source terms corresponding to the radiation four-force applied to both the radiation and hydrodynamic variables. A method-of-lines formulation is also used for the time integration, with the time integration done by the same integrator chosen for the hydrodynamic subsystem.