A pilgrimage to gravity on GPUs

TL;DR

This review traces the evolution of GPU technology over five decades and highlights its significant impact on astrophysical simulations, especially N-body problems, since the advent of CUDA in 2007.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of GPU developments and their increasing role in advanced astrophysical simulation algorithms over the past 5 decades.

Findings

GPU hardware has become essential for high-precision N-body simulations.

CUDA significantly accelerated astrophysical computations since 2007.

GPU-based methods are now standard in computational astrophysics.

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.