Accelerating NBODY6 with a GPU-Enabled Particle-Particle Particle-Tree Scheme

Abstract

We describe a modified version of the NBODY6 code for simulating star clusters which greatly improves computational efficiency while sacrificing little in the way of accuracy. The distant force calculator is replaced by a GPU-enabled Barnes-Hut code, and integration is done with a standard leap frog scheme. Short-range forces continue to use the CPU-based fourth-order Hermite predictor-corrector scheme of NBODY6. Our code outperforms NBODY6 for systems with more than $3\times 10^5$ particles and runs more than a factor 2 faster for systems of $10^6$ particles with similar energy conservation. Our code should be useful for simulating realistic dense stellar clusters, such as globular clusters or galactic nuclei.

arXiv comment9 pages, 14 figures

References in corpus (8)

• The DRAGON simulations: globular cluster evolution with a million stars
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• NBODY6++GPU: Ready for the gravitational million-body problem
• MOCCA Code for Star Cluster Simulations - II. Comparison with N-body Simulations
• PeTar: a high-performance N-body code for modeling massive collisional stellar systems
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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Stellar Collisions in Galactic Nuclei: Impact on Destructive Events Near a Supermassive Black Hole
• Dynamics in the outskirts of four Milky Way globular clusters: it's the tides that dominate
• Direct N-body simulations of NGC 6397 and its tidal tails
• On the physical size of the Milky Way globular cluster NGC 7089 (M 2)