Nowadays, all projects ought to have a memorable name, and ideally one that is relevant to the project itself. While in astronomy, convoluted acronyms are extremely widespread and successful (e.g. Gadget or Eagle), we have decided to take another route for this project, and instead opting for something thematically relevant for the project whilst staying easy to remember and pronounce (like the Horizon suite of simulation).

Ran with the Ramses code, the simulation needed a name related the Ancient Egypt, just like e.g. the Sphinx project. Additionally, in the Egyptian mythology, obelisks were petrified rays of lights, and were symbols of Ra, the Sun god. Since Obelisk is a radiation-hydrodynamics simulation, that was an easy choice to make.

At the same time, with a large fraction of the group behind the simulation being connected to France in one way or another, it made sense to take a name inspired by the adventures of Asterix & Obelix. But being an international project, we had to focus on one of their adventures far away from their small village… As a side note, Obelix fell in the magic potion when he was little, so he is strong and massive, just like our overdensity has lead to the vigorous galaxy and black hole growth even at very early times.

With all this in mind, the Obelisk simulation seemed like a perfect name for the project.