Graphic-Card Cluster for Astrophysics (GraCCA) – Performance Tests
Department of Physics, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
New Astronomy, Volume 13, Issue 6, p. 418-435, arXiv:0707.2991v2 [astro-ph] (20 Jan 2008)
@article{schive2008graphic,
title={Graphic-card cluster for astrophysics (GraCCA)-performance tests},
author={Schive, H.Y. and Chien, C.H. and Wong, S.K. and Tsai, Y.C. and Chiueh, T.},
journal={New Astronomy},
volume={13},
number={6},
pages={418–435},
issn={1384-1076},
year={2008},
publisher={Elsevier}
}
In this paper, we describe the architecture and performance of the GraCCA system, a Graphic-Card Cluster for Astrophysics simulations. It consists of 16 nodes, with each node equipped with 2 modern graphic cards, the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX. This computing cluster provides a theoretical performance of 16.2 TFLOPS. To demonstrate its performance in astrophysics computation, we have implemented a parallel direct N-body simulation program with shared time-step algorithm in this system. Our system achieves a measured performance of 7.1 TFLOPS and a parallel efficiency of 90% for simulating a globular cluster of 1024K particles. In comparing with the GRAPE-6A cluster at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology), the GraCCA system achieves a more than twice higher measured speed and an even higher performance-per-dollar ratio. Moreover, our system can handle up to 320M particles and can serve as a general-purpose computing cluster for a wide range of astrophysics problems.
November 8, 2010 by hgpu
