English

Accelerating cosmological simulations on GPUs: a step towards sustainability and green-awareness

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2026-01-06 v1

Abstract

The increasing complexity and scale of cosmological N-body simulations, driven by astronomical surveys like Euclid, call for a paradigm shift towards more sustainable and energy-efficient high-performance computing (HPC). The rising energy consumption of supercomputing facilities poses a significant environmental and financial challenge. In this work, we build upon a recently developed GPU implementation of pinocchio, a widely-used tool for the fast generation of dark matter (DM) halo catalogues, to investigate energy consumption. Using a different resource configuration, we confirmed the time-to-solution behavior observed in a companion study, and we use these runs to compare time-to-solution with energy-to-solution. By profiling the code on various HPC platforms with a newly developed implementation of the Power Measurement Toolkit (PMT), we demonstrate an 8x reduction in energy-to-solution and 8x speed-up in time-to-solution compared to the CPU-only version. Taken together, these gains translate into an overall efficiency improvement of up to 64x. Our results show that the GPU-accelerated pinocchio not only achieves substantial speed-up, making the generation of large-scale mock catalogues more tractable, but also significantly reduces the energy footprint of the simulations. This work represents an step towards ``green-aware" scientific computing in cosmology, proving that performance and sustainability can be simultaneously achieved.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.01935,
  title  = {Accelerating cosmological simulations on GPUs: a step towards sustainability and green-awareness},
  author = {Giovanni Lacopo and Marius Daniel Lepinzan and David Goz and Giuliano Taffoni and Luca Tornatore and Pierluigi Monaco and Pascal Jahan Elahi and Ugo Varetto and Maciej Cytowski and Lubomir Riha},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.01935},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

40 pages, 19 figures, submitted to the Astronomy and Computing Journal