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

Wang, Long and Spurzem, Rainer and Aarseth, Sverre and Nitadori, Keigo and Berczik, Péter and Kouwenhoven, M B N and Naab, Thorsten (2015) NBODY6++GPU: ready for the gravitational million-body problem. MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY, 450 (4). pp. 4070-4080. ISSN 0035-8711

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Abstract

Accurate direct N -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 N -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 N -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 sim- ulations, NBODY6++GPU is 400 − 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% primordial binaries require about an hour per half-mass crossing time.

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