A Comparative Study on ASIC, FPGAs, GPUs and General Purpose Processors in the O(N^2) Gravitational N-body Simulation

Author

Hamada, Tsuyoshi ; Benkrid, Khaled ; Nitadori, Keigo ; Taiji, Makoto

Author_Institution

Nagasaki Adv. Comput. Center, Nagasaki Univ., Nagasaki, Japan

fYear

2009

fDate

July 29 2009-Aug. 1 2009

Firstpage

447

Lastpage

452

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the implementation of gravitational force calculation for N-body simulations in the context of astrophysics. It will describe high performance implementations on general purpose processors, GPUs, and FPGAs, and compare them using a number of criteria including speed performance, power efficiency and cost of development. These results show that, for gravitational force calculation and many-body simulations in general, GPUs are very competitive in terms of performance and performance per dollar figures, whereas FPGAs are competitive in terms of performance per Watt figures.

Keywords

N-body simulations (astronomical); application specific integrated circuits; computer graphic equipment; field programmable gate arrays; parallel processing; ASIC; FPGA; GPU; N-body simulation; astrophysics; development cost; general purpose processor; gravitational force calculation; many-body simulation; parallel computing; performance per Watt figure; performance per dollar figure; power efficiency; speed performance; Application specific integrated circuits; Computational modeling; Context modeling; Costs; Field programmable gate arrays; Gravity; Hardware; High performance computing; NASA; Pipelines; GPGPU; High Performance Computing; N-body simulation;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Adaptive Hardware and Systems, 2009. AHS 2009. NASA/ESA Conference on

Conference_Location

San Francisco, CA

Print_ISBN

978-0-7695-3714-6

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/AHS.2009.55

Filename

5325422