Not sure about this project, but a lot of physics simulations are written by computational physicists, who don't really do actual lab work, and instead spend a

Not sure about this project, but a lot of physics simulations are written by computational physicists, who don't really do actual lab work, and instead spend a lot of their time coding and optimizing. These folks are often aware of things like caches or branch prediction penalties or gpu's (mostly I see MPI codes running on largish clusters though). This doesn't mean that there is no room for optimization, most likely there's some because I am yet to see code that doesn't leave any, but it's probably not something an average CS expert would easily find.