Mercury-Opal: the GPU-accelerated version of the n-body code for planet formation Mercury-Arxes

TL;DR

Mercury-Opal is a GPU-accelerated n-body simulation code for planetary formation, offering significant performance improvements over CPU-based versions while maintaining cross-platform compatibility through OpenACC.

Contribution

This work introduces Mercury-Opal, a GPU-accelerated version of Mercury-Arxes, enabling faster planetary formation simulations with minimal code restructuring.

Findings

GPU implementation outperforms CPU-serial execution even under challenging conditions

OpenACC facilitates cross-platform support and ease of porting

Performance gains are significant despite limited computational loads

Abstract

Large n-body simulations with fully interacting objects represent the next frontier in computational planetary formation studies. In this paper, we present Mercury-Opal, the GPU-accelerated version of the n-body planet formation code Mercury-Arxes.The porting to GPU computing has been performed through OpenACC to ensure cross-platform support and minimize the code restructuring efforts while retaining most of the performance increase expected from GPU computing. We tested Mercury-Opal against its parent code Mercury-Arxes under conditions that put GPU computing at disadvantage and nevertheless show how the GPU-based execution provides advantages with respect to CPU-serial execution even for limited computational loads.