NBODY6++GPU: Ready for the gravitational million-body problem

TL;DR

NBODY6++GPU is a highly optimized, GPU-accelerated code enabling large-scale direct N-body simulations of star clusters, achieving unprecedented speed for million-body problems and realistic globular cluster modeling.

Contribution

The paper introduces NBODY6++GPU, a hybrid parallelized, GPU-accelerated code that significantly accelerates large N-body simulations, making million-body star cluster simulations feasible.

Findings

NBODY6++GPU is 400-2000 times faster than NBODY6 with 320 CPU cores and 32 GPUs.

It can simulate a million-body globular cluster in about an hour per half-mass crossing time.

First realistic globular cluster simulation with primordial binaries demonstrated.

Abstract

Accurate direct $N$-body simulations help to obtain detailed information about the dynamical evolution of star clusters. They also enable comparisons with analytical models and Fokker-Planck or Monte-Carlo methods. NBODY6 is a well-known direct $N$-body code for star clusters, and NBODY6++ is the extended version designed for large particle number simulations by supercomputers. We present NBODY6++GPU, an optimized version of NBODY6++ with hybrid parallelization methods (MPI, GPU, OpenMP, and AVX/SSE) to accelerate large direct $N$-body simulations, and in particular to solve the million-body problem. We discuss the new features of the NBODY6++GPU code, benchmarks, as well as the first results from a simulation of a realistic globular cluster initially containing a million particles. For million-body simulations, NBODY6++GPU is $400-2000$ times faster than NBODY6 with 320 CPU cores and 32 NVIDIA K20X GPUs. With this computing cluster specification, the simulations of million-body globular clusters including $5\%$ primordial binaries require about an hour per half-mass crossing time.