Sign on

SAO/NASA ADS Astronomy Abstract Service


· Find Similar Abstracts (with default settings below)
· Electronic Refereed Journal Article (HTML)
· arXiv e-print (arXiv:0902.4463)
· References in the article
· Citations to the Article (9) (Citation History)
· Refereed Citations to the Article
· Also-Read Articles (Reads History)
·
· Translate This Page
Title:
SAPPORO: A way to turn your graphics cards into a GRAPE-6
Authors:
Gaburov, Evghenii; Harfst, Stefan; Portegies Zwart, Simon
Affiliation:
AA(Astronomical Institute “Anton Pannekoek”, University of Amsterdam, 2300 Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Section Computational Science, University of Amsterdam, 2300 Amsterdam, The Netherlands), AB(Astronomical Institute “Anton Pannekoek”, University of Amsterdam, 2300 Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Section Computational Science, University of Amsterdam, 2300 Amsterdam, The Netherlands), AC(Astronomical Institute “Anton Pannekoek”, University of Amsterdam, 2300 Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Section Computational Science, University of Amsterdam, 2300 Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Publication:
New Astronomy, Volume 14, Issue 7, p. 630-637. (NewA Homepage)
Publication Date:
10/2009
Origin:
ELSEVIER
Keywords:
98.10.+z, 02.70.-c, 47.27.ek
DOI:
10.1016/j.newast.2009.03.002
Bibliographic Code:
2009NewA...14..630G

Abstract

We present Sapporo, a library for performing high precision gravitational N-body simulations on NVIDIA graphical processing units (GPUs). Our library mimics the GRAPE-6 library, and N-body codes currently running on GRAPE-6 can switch to Sapporo by a simple relinking of the library. The precision of our library is comparable to that of GRAPE-6, even though internally the GPU hardware is limited to single precision arithmetics. This limitation is effectively overcome by emulating double precision for calculating the distance between particles. The performance loss of this operation is small (≲20%) compared to the advantage of being able to run at high precision. We tested the library using several GRAPE-6-enabled N-body codes, in particular with Starlab and phiGRAPE. We measured peak performance of 800 Gflop/s for running with 106 particles on a PC with four commercial G92 architecture GPUs (two GeForce 9800GX2). As a production test, we simulated a 32 k Plummer model with equal-mass stars well beyond core collapse. The simulation took 41 days, during which the mean performance was 113 Gflop/s. The GPU did not show any problems from running in a production environment for such an extended period of time.
Bibtex entry for this abstract   Preferred format for this abstract (see Preferences)

   

Find Similar Abstracts:

Use: Authors
Title
Keywords (in text query field)
Abstract Text
Return: Query Results Return    items starting with number
Query Form
Database: Astronomy
Physics
arXiv e-prints