The Aemulus Project I: Numerical Simulations for Precision Cosmology
  The rapidly growing statistical precision of galaxy surveys has lead to a
need for ever-more precise predictions of the observables used to constrain
cosmological and galaxy formation models. The primary avenue through which such
predictions will be obtained is suites of numerical simulations. These
simulations must span the relevant model parameter spaces, be large enough to
obtain the precision demanded by upcoming data, and be thoroughly validated in
order to ensure accuracy. In this paper we present one such suite of
simulations, forming the basis for the AEMULUS Project, a collaboration devoted
to precision emulation of galaxy survey observables. We have run a set of 75
(1.05 h^-1 Gpc)^3 simulations with mass resolution and force softening of
3.51\times 10^10 (Omega_m / 0.3) ~ h^-1 M_sun and 20 ~ h^-1 kpc respectively in
47 different wCDM cosmologies spanning the range of parameter space allowed by
the combination of recent Cosmic Microwave Background, Baryon Acoustic
Oscillation and Type Ia Supernovae results. We present convergence tests of
several observables including spherical overdensity halo mass functions, galaxy
projected correlation functions, galaxy clustering in redshift space, and
matter and halo correlation functions and power spectra. We show that these
statistics are converged to 1% (2%) for halos with more than 500 (200)
particles respectively and scales of r>200 ~ h^-1 kpc in real space or k ~ 3 h
Mpc^-1 in harmonic space for z\le 1. We find that the dominant source of
uncertainty comes from varying the particle loading of the simulations. This
leads to large systematic errors for statistics using halos with fewer than 200
particles and scales smaller than k ~ 4 h^-1 Mpc. We provide the halo catalogs
and snapshots detailed in this work to the community at
https://AemulusProject.github.io.
