Astrophysical N-body simulations on GRAPE-4 special-purpose computer

ABSTRACT

We report on resent astrophysical N-body simulations performed on the GRAPE-4 (GRAvity PipE 4) system, a special-purpose computer for astrophysical N-body simulations. We first review the astrophysical motivation, the algorithm, the structure of the GRAPE system, and the actual performance. The GRAPE-4 system consists of 1692 pipeline processors. The peak speed of one pipeline processor is 523 Mflops and that of the total system is 884 Gflops. The performance obtained is 529 Gflops for the simulation of two massive black holes in the core of a galaxy with 700,000 stars.

REFERENCES

• 1: S. J. Aarseth, Monthly Notices Roy. Astron. Soc., Vol. 126, p. 223, 1963.
• 2: A. Ahmad and L. Cohen, J. Comput. Phys., Vol 12, p. 389. 1973
• 3: James H. Applegate , Michael R. Douglas , Yekta Gürsel , Peter Hunter , Charles L. Seitz , Gerald J. Sussman, A digital orrery, IEEE Transactions on Computers, v.34 n.9, p.822-831, Sept. 1985 [doi>10.1109/TC.1985.1676638]
• 4: J. E. Barnes and P. Hut, Nature Vol. 324, p. 446, 1986.
• 5: Joshua E. Barnes, A modified tree code: don't laugh; it runs, Journal of Computational Physics, v.87 n.1, p.161-170, March 1990 [doi>10.1016/0021-9991(90)90232-P]
• 6: J. A. Board, Z. S. Hakura, W. D. Elliott and W. T. Rankin, in Proceedings of the 7th SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing, et. D. H. Bailey et al, SIAM, 1995, p 295.
• 7: F. Governato, M. Colpi and L. Maraschi, preprint, 1994.
• 8: L. Greengard, The rapid evaluation of potential field in particle systems, MIT Press, 1988.
• 9: R. W. Hockney , J. W. Eastwood, Computer simulation using particles, Taylor & Francis, Inc., Bristol, PA, 1988
• 10: Junichiro Makino, Vectorization of a treecode, Journal of Computational Physics, v.87 n.1, p.148-160, March 1990 [doi>10.1016/0021-9991(90)90231-O]
• 11: J. Makino, T. Fukushige, S. K. Okumura and T. Ebisuzaki, Publ. Astron. Soc. J., Vol. p. 45, 303, 1993.
• 12: Junichiro Makino , Makoto Taiji , Toshikazu Ebisuzaki , Daiichiro Sugimoto, GRAPE-4: a one-Tflops special-purpose computer for astrophysical N-body problem, Proceedings of the 1994 conference on Supercomputing, p.429-438, December 1994, Washington, D.C., United States
• 13: S. L. W. McMillan and S. J. Aarseth, Astrophys. J., Vol. 414, p. 200, 1993.
• 14: J. K. Salmon, M. P. Warren and G. S. Winckelmans, Intl. J. Supercomputer Appl. Vol 8, p 129, 1994.
• 15: S. Sigrudsson, L. Hernquist and G. D. Quinlan, Astrophys. J., Vol 446, p 75.
• 16: R. Spurzem, A parallel implementation of an Aarseth N-body integrator on the CRAY T3D, in preparation.
• 17: R. Spurzem and S. Aarseth, in preparation.
• 18: D. Sugimoto, Y. Chikada, J. Makino, T. Ito, T. Ebisuzaki and M. Umemura, Nature, Vol. 345, p. 33, 1990.
• 19: G. J. Sussman and J. Wisdom, Science, Vol 241, p. 433, 1988.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.3 SPECIAL-PURPOSE AND APPLICATION-BASED SYSTEMS

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.1 PROCESSOR ARCHITECTURES
      C.1.2 Multiple Data Stream Architectures (Multiprocessors)
          Subjects: Pipeline processors**
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS

  J. Computer Applications
  J.2 PHYSICAL SCIENCES AND ENGINEERING
      Subjects: Astronomy

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Measurement, Performance

Keywords:
N-body simulation, astrophysics, special-purpose computer, MPP