Abstract: "In this paper, we describe the architecture and performance of the GraCCA system, a Graphic-Card Cluster for Astrophysics simulations. It consists of 16 nodes, with each node equipped with 2 modern graphic cards, the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX. This computing cluster provides a theoretical performance of 16.2 TFLOPS. To demonstrate its performance in astrophysics computation, we have implemented a parallel direct N-body simulation program with shared time-step algorithm in this system. Our system achieves a measured performance of 7.1 TFLOPS and a parallel efficiency of 90% for simulating a globular cluster of 1024K particles. In comparing with the GRAPE-6A cluster at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology), the GraCCA system achieves a more than twice higher measured speed and an even higher performance-per-dollar ratio. Moreover, our system can handle up to 320M particles and can serve as a general-purpose computing cluster for a wide range of astrophysics problems. (Hsi-Yu Schive, Chia-Hung Chien, Shing-Kwong Wong, Yu-Chih Tsai, Tzihong Chiueh. Graphic-Card Cluster for Astrophysics (GraCCA) -- Performance Tests. submitted to New Astronomy, 20 July, 2007.)

Abstract: "We present the results of gravitational direct N-body simulations using the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) on a commercial NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTX designed for gaming computers. The force evaluation of the N-body problem is implemented in "Compute Unified Device Architecture" (CUDA) using the GPU to speed-up the calculations. We tested the implementation on three different N-body codes: two direct N-body integration codes, using the 4th order predictor-corrector Hermite integrator with block time-steps, and one Barnes-Hut treecode, which uses a 2nd order leapfrog integration scheme. The integration of the equations of motions for all codes is performed on the host CPU. We find that for N > 512 particles the GPU outperforms the GRAPE-6Af, if some softening in the force calculation is accepted. Without softening and for very small integration time steps the GRAPE still outperforms the GPU. We conclude that modern GPUs offer an attractive alternative to GRAPE-6Af special purpose hardware. Using the same time-step criterion, the total energy of the N-body system was conserved better than to one in 10^6 on the GPU, only about an order of magnitude worse than obtained with GRAPE-6Af. For N \apgt 10^5 the 8800GTX outperforms the host CPU by a factor of about 100 and runs at about the same speed as the GRAPE-6Af." (Robert G. Belleman, Jeroen Bedorf, Simon Portegies Zwart. High Performance Direct Gravitational N-body Simulations on Graphics Processing Units -- II: An implementation in CUDA. Accepted for publication in New Astronomy.)