7.0/Mflops Astrophysical N-Body Simulation with Treecode on GRAPE-5

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a high-performance astrophysical N-body simulation using the GRAPE-5 system, achieving a cost-effective 7.0 dollars per Mflops with 2.1 million particles.

Contribution

It presents the first large-scale N-body simulation on GRAPE-5, showcasing its efficiency and cost-effectiveness for astrophysical computations.

Findings

Achieved 5.92 Gflops performance with 2.1 million particles.

Cost per performance was 7.0 dollars per Mflops.

Demonstrated the system's suitability for large-scale cosmological simulations.

Abstract

As an entry for the 1999 Gordon Bell price/performance prize, we report an astrophysical N-body simulation performed with a treecode on GRAPE-5 (Gravity Pipe 5) system, a special-purpose computer for astrophysical N-body simulations. The GRAPE-5 system has 32 pipeline processors specialized for the gravitational force calculation. Other operations, such as tree construction, tree traverse and time integration, are performed on a general purpose workstation. The total cost for the GRAPE-5 system is 40,900 dollars. We performed a cosmological N-body simulation with 2.1 million particles, which sustained a performance of 5.92 Gflops averaged over 8.37 hours. The price per performance obtained is 7.0 dollars per Mflops.