Sign on

SAO/NASA ADS Astronomy Abstract Service

· Find Similar Abstracts (with default settings below)
· Electronic Refereed Journal Article (HTML)
· arXiv e-print (arXiv:0707.0438)
· References in the article
· Citations to the Article (24) (Citation History)
· Refereed Citations to the Article
· Also-Read Articles (Reads History)
·
· Translate This Page
Title:
High performance direct gravitational N-body simulations on graphics processing units II: An implementation in CUDA
Authors:
Belleman, Robert G.; Bédorf, Jeroen; Portegies Zwart, Simon F.
Affiliation:
AA(Section Computational Science, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands), AB(Section Computational Science, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands), AC(Section Computational Science, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Astronomical Institute “Anton Pannekoek”, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Publication:
New Astronomy, Volume 13, Issue 2, p. 103-112. (NewA Homepage)
Publication Date:
02/2008
Origin:
ELSEVIER
DOI:
10.1016/j.newast.2007.07.004
Bibliographic Code:
2008NewA...13..103B

Abstract

We present the results of gravitational direct N-body simulations using the graphics processing unit (GPU) on a commercial NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTX designed for gaming computers. The force evaluation of the N-body problem is implemented in “Compute Unified Device Architecture” (CUDA) using the GPU to speedup the calculations. We tested the implementation on three different N-body codes: two direct N-body integration codes, using the 4th order predictor corrector Hermite integrator with block time-steps, and one Barnes-Hut treecode, which uses a 2nd order leapfrog integration scheme. The integration of the equations of motions for all codes is performed on the host CPU. We find that for N > 512 particles the GPU outperforms the GRAPE-6Af, if some softening in the force calculation is accepted. Without softening and for very small integration time-steps the GRAPE still outperforms the GPU. We conclude that modern GPUs offer an attractive alternative to GRAPE-6Af special purpose hardware. Using the same time-step criterion, the total energy of the N-body system was conserved better than to one in 106 on the GPU, only about an order of magnitude worse than obtained with GRAPE-6Af. For N ≳ 105 the 8800GTX outperforms the host CPU by a factor of about 100 and runs at about the same speed as the GRAPE-6Af.
Bibtex entry for this abstract   Preferred format for this abstract (see Preferences)
   

Find Similar Abstracts:

Use: Authors
Title
Abstract Text
Return: Query Results Return    items starting with number
Query Form
Database: Astronomy
Physics
arXiv e-prints