Accelerating cosmological simulations on GPUs: a step towards sustainability and green-awareness

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that GPU acceleration of cosmological simulations significantly reduces energy consumption and execution time, advancing sustainable high-performance computing in cosmology.

Contribution

It introduces a GPU implementation of pinocchio that achieves up to 8x speed-up and 8x energy reduction, enhancing efficiency and sustainability in cosmological simulations.

Findings

8x reduction in energy-to-solution

8x speed-up in time-to-solution

up to 64x overall efficiency improvement

Abstract

The increasing complexity and scale of cosmological N-body simulations, driven by astronomical surveys like Euclid, call for a paradigm shift towards more sustainable and energy-efficient high-performance computing (HPC). The rising energy consumption of supercomputing facilities poses a significant environmental and financial challenge. In this work, we build upon a recently developed GPU implementation of pinocchio, a widely-used tool for the fast generation of dark matter (DM) halo catalogues, to investigate energy consumption. Using a different resource configuration, we confirmed the time-to-solution behavior observed in a companion study, and we use these runs to compare time-to-solution with energy-to-solution. By profiling the code on various HPC platforms with a newly developed implementation of the Power Measurement Toolkit (PMT), we demonstrate an 8x reduction in energy-to-solution and 8x speed-up in time-to-solution compared to the CPU-only version. Taken together, these gains translate into an overall efficiency improvement of up to 64x. Our results show that the GPU-accelerated pinocchio not only achieves substantial speed-up, making the generation of large-scale mock catalogues more tractable, but also significantly reduces the energy footprint of the simulations. This work represents an step towards ``green-aware" scientific computing in cosmology, proving that performance and sustainability can be simultaneously achieved.