Graphic-Card Cluster for Astrophysics (GraCCA) -- Performance Tests
Abstract
In this paper, we describe the architecture and performance of the GraCCA system, a Graphic-Card Cluster for Astrophysics simulations. It consists of 16 nodes, with each node equipped with 2 modern graphic cards, the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX. This computing cluster provides a theoretical performance of 16.2 TFLOPS. To demonstrate its performance in astrophysics computation, we have implemented a parallel direct N-body simulation program with shared time-step algorithm in this system. Our system achieves a measured performance of 7.1 TFLOPS and a parallel efficiency of 90% for simulating a globular cluster of 1024K particles. In comparing with the GRAPE-6A cluster at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology), the GraCCA system achieves a more than twice higher measured speed and an even higher performance-per-dollar ratio. Moreover, our system can handle up to 320M particles and can serve as a general-purpose computing cluster for a wide range of astrophysics problems.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0707.2991,
title = {Graphic-Card Cluster for Astrophysics (GraCCA) -- Performance Tests},
author = {Hsi-Yu Schive and Chia-Hung Chien and Shing-Kwong Wong and Yu-Chih Tsai and Tzihong Chiueh},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0707.2991},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
Accepted for publication in New Astronomy