Key developers of the Illustris simulation have been Volker Springel (Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik) and Mark Vogelsberger (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
The Illustris simulation framework and galaxy formation model has been used for a wide range of spin-off projects, starting with Auriga and IllustrisTNG (both 2017) followed by Thesan (2021), MillenniumTNG (2022) and TNG-Cluster (2023).
The original Illustris project was carried out by Mark Vogelsberger[8] and collaborators as the first large-scale galaxy formation application of Volker Springel's novel Arepo code.
[9] The Illustris project included large-scale cosmological simulations of the evolution of the universe, spanning initial conditions of the Big Bang, to the present day, 13.8 billion years later.
This code solves the coupled equations of gravity and hydrodynamics using a discretization of space based on a moving Voronoi tessellation.
In April, 2015 (eleven months after the first papers were published) the project team publicly released all data products from all simulations.
Unlike Illustris, it was run on the Hazel Hen machine at the High Performance Computing Center, Stuttgart in Germany.