Scalable Cosmological Simulations on Parallel Machines

Cosmological simulators are currently an important compo- nent in the study of the formation of galaxies and planetary systems. However, existing simulators do not scale effectively on more recent ma- chines containing thousands of processors. In this paper, we introduce a new parallel simulator called ParallelGravity. This simulator is based on the Charm++ infrastructure, which provides a powerful runtime sys- tem that automatically maps computation to physical processors. Using Charm++ features, in particular its measurement-based load balancers, we were able to scale the gravitational force calculation of ParallelGravity on up to one thousand processors, with astronomical datasets containing millions of particles. As we pursue the completion of a production version of the code, our current experimental results show that ParallelGravity may become a powerful resource for the astronomy community.

Filippo Gioachin, Amit Sharma, Sayantan Chakravorty, Celso Mendes, Laxmikant V. Kale, Thomas R. Quinn.
"Scalable Cosmological Simulations on Parallel Machines".
Proceedings of the 7th International Meeting on High Performance Computing for Computational Science (VECPAR 2006). LNCS 4395, pp 476-489, 2007

@INPROCEEDINGS{cosmo2006, 
  TITLE = "Scalable Cosmology Simulations on Parallel Machines",
  AUTHOR = "Filippo Gioachin and Amit Sharma and Sayantan Chakravorty and Celso Mendes and Laxmikant V. Kale and Thomas R. Quinn",
  BOOKTITLE = "VECPAR 2006, LNCS 4395, pp. 476-489",
  YEAR = "2007"
}