Adaptive Techniques for Clustered N-Body Cosmological Simulations

ChaNGa is an N-body cosmology simulation application implemented using Charm++. In this paper, we present the parallel design of ChaNGa and address many challenges arising due to the high dynamic ranges of clustered datasets. We propose optimizations based on adaptive techniques. We evaluate the performance of ChaNGa on highly clustered datasets: a z ∼ 0 snapshot of a 2 billion particle realization of a 25 Mpc volume, and a 52 million particle multi-resolution realization of a dwarf galaxy. For the 25 Mpc volume, we show strong scaling on up to 128K cores of Blue Waters. We also demonstrate scaling up to 128K cores of a multi-stepping run of the 2 billion particle simulation. While the scaling of the multi-stepping run is not as good as single stepping, the throughput at 128K cores is greater by a factor of 2. We also demonstrate strong scaling on up to 512K cores of Blue Waters for two large, uniform datasets with 12 and 24 billion particles.

@article{menon2015adaptive,
  title={Adaptive techniques for clustered N-body cosmological simulations},
  author={Menon, Harshitha and Wesolowski, Lukasz and Zheng, Gengbin and Jetley, Pritish and Kale, Laxmikant and Quinn, Thomas and Governato, Fabio},
  journal={Computational Astrophysics and Cosmology},
  volume={2},
  number={1},
  pages={1--16},
  year={2015},
  publisher={Springer}
}