Includes bibliographical references.This project concerns the investigation, performance profiling and optimisation of the high performance cosmological code, GADGET-3. This code was used to develop a synthetic field-of-view, or lightcone, for the MeerKAT telescope to replicate what it will observe when it conducts the LADUMA ultra-deep HI survey. This lightcone will assist in the planning process of the survey. The deliverables for this project are summarised as follows: * Provide an up-to-date performance evaluation and optimisation report for the cosmological simulation code GADGET-3. * Use GADGET-3 to produce an sufficiently high resolution simulation of a region of the Universe. • Develop a Python code to produce a lightcone which represents the MeerKAT telescope's field-of-view, by post-processing simulation output snapshots. * Extract relevant metadata from the simulation snapshots to provide additional insight into the simulated observation. * Produce an efficiently written and well documented software package to enable other researchers to produce synthetic lightcones
