Paper Info
Title
SAPPORO: A way to turn your graphics cards into a GRAPE-6
Abstract
We present Sapporo, a library for performing high precision gravitational N-body simulations on NVIDIA graphical processing units (GPUs). Our library mimics the GRAPE-6 library, and N-body codes currently running on GRAPE-6 can switch to Sapporo by a simple relinking of the library. The precision of our library is comparable to that of GRAPE-6, even though internally the GPU hardware is limited to single precision arithmetics. This limitation is effectively overcome by emulating double precision for calculating the distance between particles. The performance loss of this operation is small (≲20%) compared to the advantage of being able to run at high precision. We tested the library using several GRAPE-6-enabled N-body codes, in particular with Starlab and phiGRAPE. We measured peak performance of 800Gflop/s for running with 106 particles on a PC with four commercial G92 architecture GPUs (two GeForce 9800GX2). As a production test, we simulated a 32k Plummer model with equal-mass stars well beyond core collapse. The simulation took 41days, during which the mean performance was 113Gflop/s. The GPU did not show any problems from running in a production environment for such an extended period of time.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1016/j.newast.2009.03.002
New Astronomy
Keywords
DocType
Volume
98.10.+z,02.70.-c,47.27.ek
Journal
14
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
7
1384-1076
19
PageRank 
References 
Authors
2.24
6
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Evghenii Gaburov1938.29
Stefan Harfst2314.05
Simon Portegies Zwart319223.58