A sparse octree gravitational N-body code that runs entirely on the GPU processor
Abstract
We present parallel algorithms for constructing and traversing sparse octrees on graphics processing units (GPUs). The algorithms are based on parallel-scan and sort methods. To test the performance and feasibility, we implemented them in CUDA in the form of a gravitational tree-code which completely runs on the GPU.(The code is publicly available at: http://castle.strw.leidenuniv.nl/software.html) The tree construction and traverse algorithms are portable to many-core devices which have support for CUDA or OpenCL programming languages. The gravitational tree-code outperforms tuned CPU code during the tree-construction and shows a performance improvement of more than a factor 20 overall, resulting in a processing rate of more than 2.8 million particles per second.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1106.1900,
title = {A sparse octree gravitational N-body code that runs entirely on the GPU processor},
author = {Jeroen Bédorf and Evghenii Gaburov and Simon Portegies Zwart},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1106.1900},
year = {2012}
}
Comments
Accepted version. Published in Journal of Computational Physics. 35 pages, 12 figures, single column