English

NBODY6++GPU: Ready for the gravitational million-body problem

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2015-09-23 v2 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

Accurate direct NN-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 NN-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 NN-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 4002000400-2000 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%5\% primordial binaries require about an hour per half-mass crossing time.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1504.03687,
  title  = {NBODY6++GPU: Ready for the gravitational million-body problem},
  author = {Long Wang and Rainer Spurzem and Sverre Aarseth and Keigo Nitadori and Peter Berczik and M. B. N. Kouwenhoven and Thorsten Naab},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1504.03687},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

13 pages, 9 figures, 3 tables

R2 v1 2026-06-22T09:16:03.269Z