6,215 research outputs found
A pilgrimage to gravity on GPUs
In this short review we present the developments over the last 5 decades that
have led to the use of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for astrophysical
simulations. Since the introduction of NVIDIA's Compute Unified Device
Architecture (CUDA) in 2007 the GPU has become a valuable tool for N-body
simulations and is so popular these days that almost all papers about high
precision N-body simulations use methods that are accelerated by GPUs. With the
GPU hardware becoming more advanced and being used for more advanced algorithms
like gravitational tree-codes we see a bright future for GPU like hardware in
computational astrophysics.Comment: To appear in: European Physical Journal "Special Topics" : "Computer
Simulations on Graphics Processing Units" . 18 pages, 8 figure
Status and Future Perspectives for Lattice Gauge Theory Calculations to the Exascale and Beyond
In this and a set of companion whitepapers, the USQCD Collaboration lays out
a program of science and computing for lattice gauge theory. These whitepapers
describe how calculation using lattice QCD (and other gauge theories) can aid
the interpretation of ongoing and upcoming experiments in particle and nuclear
physics, as well as inspire new ones.Comment: 44 pages. 1 of USQCD whitepapers
Performance analysis of parallel gravitational -body codes on large GPU cluster
We compare the performance of two very different parallel gravitational
-body codes for astrophysical simulations on large GPU clusters, both
pioneer in their own fields as well as in certain mutual scales - NBODY6++ and
Bonsai. We carry out the benchmark of the two codes by analyzing their
performance, accuracy and efficiency through the modeling of structure
decomposition and timing measurements. We find that both codes are heavily
optimized to leverage the computational potential of GPUs as their performance
has approached half of the maximum single precision performance of the
underlying GPU cards. With such performance we predict that a speed-up of
can be achieved when up to 1k processors and GPUs are employed
simultaneously. We discuss the quantitative information about comparisons of
two codes, finding that in the same cases Bonsai adopts larger time steps as
well as relative energy errors than NBODY6++, typically ranging from
times larger, depending on the chosen parameters of the codes. While the two
codes are built for different astrophysical applications, in specified
conditions they may overlap in performance at certain physical scale, and thus
allowing the user to choose from either one with finetuned parameters
accordingly.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables, accepted for publication in Research
in Astronomy and Astrophysics (RAA
High-level programming of stencil computations on multi-GPU systems using the SkelCL library
The implementation of stencil computations on modern, massively parallel systems with GPUs and other accelerators currently relies on manually-tuned coding using low-level approaches like OpenCL and CUDA. This makes development of stencil applications a complex, time-consuming, and error-prone task. We describe how stencil computations can be programmed in our SkelCL approach that combines high-level programming abstractions with competitive performance on multi-GPU systems. SkelCL extends the OpenCL standard by three high-level features: 1) pre-implemented parallel patterns (a.k.a. skeletons); 2) container data types for vectors and matrices; 3) automatic data (re)distribution mechanism. We introduce two new SkelCL skeletons which specifically target stencil computations – MapOverlap and Stencil – and we describe their use for particular application examples, discuss their efficient parallel implementation, and report experimental results on systems with multiple GPUs. Our evaluation of three real-world applications shows that stencil code written with SkelCL is considerably shorter and offers competitive performance to hand-tuned OpenCL code
Enhancing speed and scalability of the ParFlow simulation code
Regional hydrology studies are often supported by high resolution simulations
of subsurface flow that require expensive and extensive computations. Efficient
usage of the latest high performance parallel computing systems becomes a
necessity. The simulation software ParFlow has been demonstrated to meet this
requirement and shown to have excellent solver scalability for up to 16,384
processes. In the present work we show that the code requires further
enhancements in order to fully take advantage of current petascale machines. We
identify ParFlow's way of parallelization of the computational mesh as a
central bottleneck. We propose to reorganize this subsystem using fast mesh
partition algorithms provided by the parallel adaptive mesh refinement library
p4est. We realize this in a minimally invasive manner by modifying selected
parts of the code to reinterpret the existing mesh data structures. We evaluate
the scaling performance of the modified version of ParFlow, demonstrating good
weak and strong scaling up to 458k cores of the Juqueen supercomputer, and test
an example application at large scale.Comment: The final publication is available at link.springer.co
The stellar atmosphere simulation code Bifrost
Context: Numerical simulations of stellar convection and photospheres have
been developed to the point where detailed shapes of observed spectral lines
can be explained. Stellar atmospheres are very complex, and very different
physical regimes are present in the convection zone, photosphere, chromosphere,
transition region and corona. To understand the details of the atmosphere it is
necessary to simulate the whole atmosphere since the different layers interact
strongly. These physical regimes are very diverse and it takes a highly
efficient massively parallel numerical code to solve the associated equations.
Aims: The design, implementation and validation of the massively parallel
numerical code Bifrost for simulating stellar atmospheres from the convection
zone to the corona.
Methods: The code is subjected to a number of validation tests, among them
the Sod shock tube test, the Orzag-Tang colliding shock test, boundary
condition tests and tests of how the code treats magnetic field advection,
chromospheric radiation, radiative transfer in an isothermal scattering
atmosphere, hydrogen ionization and thermal conduction.
Results: Bifrost completes the tests with good results and shows near linear
efficiency scaling to thousands of computing cores
- …