nbody6++gpu: ready for the gravitational million-body problem

Accurate direct N-body simulations help to obtain detailed information about the dynamical evolution of star clusters. They also enable comparisons with analytical models and Fokker-Planck or Monte Carlo methods. nbody6 is a well-known direct N-body code for star clusters, and nbody6++ is the extend...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 2015-07, Vol.450 (4), p.4070-4080
Main Authors: Wang, Long, Spurzem, Rainer, Aarseth, Sverre, Nitadori, Keigo, Berczik, Peter, Kouwenhoven, M. B. N., Naab, Thorsten
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Benchmarks
Computer simulation
Dynamical systems
Globular clusters
Gravitation
Mathematical analysis
Monte Carlo simulation
Problem solving
Specifications
Star & galaxy formation
Star clusters
Supercomputers
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Request full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Accurate direct N-body simulations help to obtain detailed information about the dynamical evolution of star clusters. They also enable comparisons with analytical models and Fokker-Planck or Monte Carlo methods. nbody6 is a well-known direct N-body code for star clusters, and nbody6++ is the extended version designed for large particle number simulations by supercomputers. We present nbody6++gpu, an optimized version of nbody6++ with hybrid parallelization methods (MPI, GPU, OpenMP, and AVX/SSE) to accelerate large direct N-body simulations, and in particular to solve the million-body problem. We discuss the new features of the nbody6++gpu code, benchmarks, as well as the first results from a simulation of a realistic globular cluster initially containing a million particles. For million-body simulations, nbody6++gpu is 400–2000 times faster than nbody6 with 320 CPU cores and 32 NVIDIA K20X GPUs. With this computing cluster specification, the simulations of million-body globular clusters including 5 per cent primordial binaries require about an hour per half-mass crossing time.
ISSN:0035-8711
1365-2966
DOI:10.1093/mnras/stv817