3,262 research outputs found
Scaling Hierarchical N-body Simulations on GPU Clusters
Abstract â This paper focuses on the use of GPGPU-based clus-ters for hierarchical N-body simulations. Whereas the behavior of these hierarchical methods has been studied in the past on CPU-based architectures, we investigate key performance issues in the context of clusters of GPUs. These include kernel orga-nization and efficiency, the balance between tree traversal and force computation work, grain size selection through the tuning of offloaded work request sizes, and the reduction of sequential bottlenecks. The effects of various application parameters are studied and experiments done to quantify gains in performance. Our studies are carried out in the context of a production-quality parallel cosmological simulator called ChaNGa. We highlight the re-engineering of the application to make it more suitable for GPU-based environments. Finally, we present performance results from experiments on the NCSA Lincoln GPU cluster, including a note on GPU use in multistepped simulations
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
NBODY6++GPU: Ready for the gravitational million-body problem
Accurate direct -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 -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 -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 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 primordial binaries require
about an hour per half-mass crossing time.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, 3 table
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
A sparse octree gravitational N-body code that runs entirely on the GPU processor
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.Comment: Accepted version. Published in Journal of Computational Physics. 35
pages, 12 figures, single colum
Sapporo2: A versatile direct -body library
Astrophysical direct -body methods have been one of the first production
algorithms to be implemented using NVIDIA's CUDA architecture. Now, almost
seven years later, the GPU is the most used accelerator device in astronomy for
simulating stellar systems. In this paper we present the implementation of the
Sapporo2 -body library, which allows researchers to use the GPU for -body
simulations with little to no effort. The first version, released five years
ago, is actively used, but lacks advanced features and versatility in numerical
precision and support for higher order integrators. In this updated version we
have rebuilt the code from scratch and added support for OpenCL,
multi-precision and higher order integrators. We show how to tune these codes
for different GPU architectures and present how to continue utilizing the GPU
optimal even when only a small number of particles () is integrated.
This careful tuning allows Sapporo2 to be faster than Sapporo1 even with the
added options and double precision data loads. The code runs on a range of
NVIDIA and AMD GPUs in single and double precision accuracy. With the addition
of OpenCL support the library is also able to run on CPUs and other
accelerators that support OpenCL.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures. Accepted for publication in Computational
Astrophysics and Cosmolog
Petascale turbulence simulation using a highly parallel fast multipole method on GPUs
This paper reports large-scale direct numerical simulations of
homogeneous-isotropic fluid turbulence, achieving sustained performance of 1.08
petaflop/s on gpu hardware using single precision. The simulations use a vortex
particle method to solve the Navier-Stokes equations, with a highly parallel
fast multipole method (FMM) as numerical engine, and match the current record
in mesh size for this application, a cube of 4096^3 computational points solved
with a spectral method. The standard numerical approach used in this field is
the pseudo-spectral method, relying on the FFT algorithm as numerical engine.
The particle-based simulations presented in this paper quantitatively match the
kinetic energy spectrum obtained with a pseudo-spectral method, using a trusted
code. In terms of parallel performance, weak scaling results show the fmm-based
vortex method achieving 74% parallel efficiency on 4096 processes (one gpu per
mpi process, 3 gpus per node of the TSUBAME-2.0 system). The FFT-based spectral
method is able to achieve just 14% parallel efficiency on the same number of
mpi processes (using only cpu cores), due to the all-to-all communication
pattern of the FFT algorithm. The calculation time for one time step was 108
seconds for the vortex method and 154 seconds for the spectral method, under
these conditions. Computing with 69 billion particles, this work exceeds by an
order of magnitude the largest vortex method calculations to date
- âŠ