High Performance Direct Gravitational N-body Simulations on Graphics Processing Units

We present the results of gravitational direct N-body simulations using the commercial graphics processing units (GPU) NVIDIA Quadro FX1400 and GeForce 8800GTX, and compare the results with GRAPE-6Af special purpose hardware. The force evaluation of the N-body problem was implemented in Cg using the GPU directly to speed-up the calculations. The integration of the equations of motions were, running on the host computer, implemented in C using the 4th order predictor–corrector Hermite integrator with block time steps. We find that for a large number of particles (N J 104 ) modern graphics processing units offer an attractive low cost alternative to GRAPE special purpose hardware. A modern GPU continues to give a relatively flat scaling with the number of particles, comparable to that of the GRAPE. The GRAPE is designed to reach double precision, whereas the GPU is intrinsically single-precision. For relatively large time steps, the total energy of the N-body system was conserved b...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Simon Portegies Zwart, Robert G. Belleman, Peter Geldof
• Keywords: CORR 2007, Education, Grape, Special Purpose Hardware, Time Steps