A Comparative Study on ASIC, FPGAs, GPUs and General Purpose Processors in the O(N^2) Gravitational N-body Simulation
Nagasaki Advanced Computing Center, Nagasaki University, 1-14, Bunkyo-machi, Nagasaki, 852-8521 Japan
NASA/ESA Conference on Adaptive Hardware and Systems, 2009. AHS 2009
@conference{hamada2009comparative,
title={A Comparative Study on ASIC, FPGAs, GPUs and General Purpose Processors in the O (N^{} 2) Gravitational N-body Simulation},
author={Hamada, T. and Benkrid, K. and Nitadori, K. and Taiji, M.},
booktitle={2009 NASA/ESA Conference on Adaptive Hardware and Systems},
pages={447–452},
year={2009},
organization={IEEE}
}
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.
April 8, 2011 by hgpu
