Title :
GRAPE-8 -- An accelerator for gravitational N-body simulation with 20.5Gflops/W performance
Author :
Makino, J. ; Daisaka, H.
Author_Institution :
Interactive Res. Center of Sci., Tokyo Inst. of Technol., Tokyo, Japan
Abstract :
In this paper, we describe the design and performance of GRAPE-8 accelerator processor for gravitational N-body simulations. It is designed to evaluate gravitational interaction with cutoff between particles. The cutoff function is useful for schemes like TreePM or Particle-Particle Particle-Tree, in which gravitational force is divided to short-range and longrange components. A single GRAPE-8 processor chip integrates 48 pipeline processors. The effective number of floating-point operations per interaction is around 40. Thus the peak performance of a single GRAPE-8 processor chip is 480 Gflops. A GRAPE-8 processor card houses two GRAPE-8 chips and one FPGA chip for PCI-Express interface. The total power consumption of the board is 46W. Thus, theoretical peak performance per watt is 20.5 Gflops/W. The effective performance of the total system, including the host computer, is around 5Gflops/W. This is more than a factor of two higher than the highest number in the current Green500 list.
Keywords :
N-body simulations (astronomical); field programmable gate arrays; gravitation; microprocessor chips; peripheral interfaces; FPGA chip; GRAPE-8 accelerator processor; GRAPE-8 processor chip; Green500 list; PCI-Express interface; TreePM scheme; field programmable gate array; floating-point operation; gravitational N-body simulation; particle-particle particle-tree scheme; peripheral component interconnect; pipeline processor; Computers; Field programmable gate arrays; Gravity; Hardware; Pipelines; Random access memory;
Conference_Titel :
High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC), 2012 International Conference for
Conference_Location :
Salt Lake City, UT
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4673-0805-2
