Experiences with parallel N-body simulation

Pangfeng Liu, Sandeep N. Bhatt

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

20 Scopus citations

Abstract

This paper describes our experiences developing high- performance code for astrophysical iV-body simulations. Recent N-body methods are based on an adaptive tree structure. The tree must be built and maintained across physically distributed memory; moreover, the communication requirements are irregular and adaptive. Together with the need to balance the computational work-load among processors, these issues pose interesting challenges and tradeoffs for high-performance implementation. Our implementation was guided by the need to keep solutions simple and general. We use a technique for implicitly representing a dynamic global tree across multiple processors which substantially reduces the programming complexity as well as the performance overheads of distributed memory architectures. The contributions include methods to vectorize the computation and minimize communication time which are theoretically and experimentally justified. The code has been tested by varying the number and distribution of bodies on different configurations of the Connection Machine CM-5. The overall performance on instances with 10 million bodies is typically over 30% of the peak machine rate. Preliminary timings compare favorably with other approaches.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 6th Annual ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures, SPAA 1994
Pages122-131
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)0897916719, 9780897916714
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Aug 1994
Event6th Annual ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures, SPAA 1994 - Cape May, United States
Duration: 27 Jun 199429 Jun 1994

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 6th Annual ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures, SPAA 1994

Conference

Conference6th Annual ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures, SPAA 1994
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityCape May
Period27/06/9429/06/94

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