A pilgrimage to gravity on GPUs

Abstract

In this short review we present the developments over the last 5 decades that have led to the use of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for astrophysical simulations. Since the introduction of NVIDIA's Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) in 2007 the GPU has become a valuable tool for N-body simulations and is so popular these days that almost all papers about high precision N-body simulations use methods that are accelerated by GPUs. With the GPU hardware becoming more advanced and being used for more advanced algorithms like gravitational tree-codes we see a bright future for GPU like hardware in computational astrophysics.

To appear in: European Physical Journal "Special Topics" : "Computer Simulations on Graphics Processing Units" . 18 pages, 8 figures

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• A fully parallel, high precision, N-body code running on hybrid computing platforms
• The moment of core collapse in star clusters with a mass function
• The secular evolution of the Kuiper belt after a close stellar encounter
• The initial conditions of observed star clusters - I. Method description and validation
• GPU-accelerated simulation of colloidal suspensions with direct hydrodynamic interactions
• Sapporo2: A versatile direct $N$-body library