Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics: Models, Applications, and Enabling Technologies

TL;DR

This paper reviews the implementation of Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) in astrophysics, exploring hardware acceleration options like FPGAs to enhance simulation performance and efficiency.

Contribution

It evaluates hybrid hardware architectures combining custom LSI and FPGAs for accelerating SPH simulations, providing cost and performance estimates.

Findings

Hardware acceleration can significantly improve SPH simulation performance.

Hybrid architectures offer a promising balance of flexibility and throughput.

Specific cost/performance benefits are identified at each computational stage.

Abstract

We present the results from a two-day study in which we discussed various implementations of Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH), one of the leading methods used across a variety of areas of large-scale astrophysical simulations. In particular, we evaluated the suitability of designing special hardware extensions, to further boost the performance of the high-end general purpose computers currently used for those simulations. We considered a range of hybrid architectures, consisting of a mix of custom LSI and reconfigurable logic, combining the extremely high throughput of Special-Purpose Devices (SPDs) with the flexibility of reconfigurable structures, based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The main findings of our workshop consist of a clarification of the decomposition of the computational requirements, together with specific estimates for cost/performance improvements that can be obtained at each stage in this decomposition, by using enabling hardware technology to accelerate the performance of general purpose computers.