WHFast512: A symplectic N-body integrator for planetary systems optimized with AVX512 instructions

TL;DR

WHFast512 is a highly optimized symplectic N-body integrator utilizing AVX512 instructions, achieving up to 4.7x speedup and enabling rapid, long-term planetary system simulations, including Solar System integrations over billions of years.

Contribution

This paper introduces WHFast512, the fastest direct N-body integrator for planetary systems, optimized with AVX512 SIMD parallelism for significantly improved performance.

Findings

Achieves up to 4.7x speedup over non-vectorized version

Can simulate Solar System for 5 billion years in under 1.4 days

Effectively models Solar System instability with a diffusion approach

Abstract

We describe the implementation of the symplectic N-body integrator WHFast512 using Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) parallelism and 512-bit Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX512). We are able to speed up integrations of planetary systems by up to 4.7x compared to the non-vectorized version of WHFast. WHFast512 can integrate the Solar System with 8 planets for 5 billion years in less than 1.4 days. To our knowledge, this makes WHFast512 the fastest direct N-body integrator for systems of this kind. As an example, we present an ensemble of 40-Gyr integrations of the Solar System. Ignoring the Sun's post-main sequence evolution, we show that the instability rate is well captured by a diffusion model. WHFast512 is freely available within the REBOUND package.