THE GENGA CODE: GRAVITATIONAL ENCOUNTERS IN N -BODY SIMULATIONS WITH GPU ACCELERATION

We describe an open source GPU implementation of a hybrid symplectic N-body integrator, GENGA (Gravitational ENcounters with Gpu Acceleration), designed to integrate planet and planetesimal dynamics in the late stage of planet formation and stability analyses of planetary systems. GENGA uses a hybri...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Astrophysical journal 2014-11, Vol.796 (1), p.1-16
Main Authors: Grimm, Simon L, Stadel, Joachim G
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
ACCELERATION
ASTROPHYSICS, COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY
COMPARATIVE EVALUATIONS
Dynamical systems
Encounters
ENERGY CONSERVATION
Gravitation
IMPLEMENTATION
Integrators
MERCURY
Mercury (planet)
Planet formation
Planetary systems
PLANETS
SATELLITES
SIMULATION
STABILITY
STAR EVOLUTION
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Summary:We describe an open source GPU implementation of a hybrid symplectic N-body integrator, GENGA (Gravitational ENcounters with Gpu Acceleration), designed to integrate planet and planetesimal dynamics in the late stage of planet formation and stability analyses of planetary systems. GENGA uses a hybrid symplectic integrator to handle close encounters with very good energy conservation, which is essential in long-term planetary system integration. We extended the second-order hybrid integration scheme to higher orders. The GENGA code supports three simulation modes: integration of up to 2048 massive bodies, integration with up to a million test particles, or parallel integration of a large number of individual planetary systems. We compare the results of GENGA to Mercury and pkdgrav2 in terms of energy conservation and performance and find that the energy conservation of GENGA is comparable to Mercury and around two orders of magnitude better than pkdgrav2. GENGA runs up to 30 times faster than Mercury and up to 8 times faster than pkdgrav2. GENGA is written in CUDA C and runs on all NVIDIA GPUs with a computing capability of at least 2.0.
ISSN:1538-4357
0004-637X
1538-4357
DOI:10.1088/0004-637X/796/1/23