Accelerating Astrophysical Particle Simulations with Programmable Hardware (FPGA and GPU)

Date:Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Time:11:00am - 12:00pm
Location: LBNL Bldg. 50A, Room 5132

Speaker:
Rainer Spurzem
ARI-ZAH
 University of Heidelberg, Germany

Abstract:

The implementation of N-Body and SPH codes on new types of accelerator
hardware (field programmable gate arrays, FPGA, and graphical processing
units, GPU) is presented. Our present main astrophysical applications
are stellar dynamical evolution of galactic nuclei with central black
holes and gravitational wave generation, and galactic dynamics with
feedback and gas and feedback using SPH. The code performance on a
single node using the different kinds of special hardware (traditional
GRAPE, FPGA, and GPU) and some implementation aspects (e.g. accuracy)
are given. We find in accord with previously published results of other
groups that for N-Body simulations (real application codes) GPU hardware
can be used with a very high efficiency and sustained speed, for low
price. FPGA is more useful for complex pipelines (like SPH), where they
reach much better efficiency and slightly better sustained speed than
GPU. Finally in an outlook it is argued that future faster and larger
generations of FPGA may provide comparable or even higher computing
power than GPU with much less power consumption - so they are a
promising path in the context of the new paradigm of "Green Computing".
Next plans to build new types of clusters are discussed.

Host of Seminar:

    Horst Simon