High Performance Computing In Astrophysics: Parallel Gasdynamics And Gasoline

High Performance Computing is steadily increasing in importance for theoretical and observational astronomy. Largely through CFI, Canadian astrophysicists have unprecedented access to near world-class facilities. We review the contributions of computational astrophysics as a leading-edge player in the development of highly parallel applications and scalable algorithms with a particular focus on self-gravitating gasdynamical simulations. We present Gasoline, our portable parallel tree code for gasdynamical simulations. We review current applications in theoretical astrophysics and chart the future development of the field in the direction of increasing physical complexity and larger dynamic ranges in time and space.