Phantom-GRAPE: Numerical software library to accelerate collisionless N-body simulation with SIMD instruction set on x86 architecture

We have developed a numerical software library for collisionless N  -body simulations named “Phantom-GRAPE” which highly accelerates force calculations among particles by use of a new SIMD instruction set extension to the x86 architecture, Advanced Vector eXtensions (AVX), an enhanced version of the Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE). In our library, not only the Newton’s forces, but also central forces with an arbitrary shape f(r)f(r), which has a finite cutoff radius rcutrcut (i.e. f(r)=0f(r)=0 at r>rcutr>rcut), can be quickly computed. In computing such central forces with an arbitrary force shape f(r)f(r), we refer to a pre-calculated look-up table. We also present a new scheme to create the look-up table whose binning is optimal to keep good accuracy in computing forces and whose size is small enough to avoid cache misses. Using an Intel Core i7–2600 processor, we measure the performance of our library for both of the Newton’s forces and the arbitrarily shaped central forces. In the case of Newton’s forces, we achieve 2×1092×109 interactions per second with one processor core (or 75 GFLOPS if we count 38 operations per interaction), which is 20 times higher than the performance of an implementation without any explicit use of SIMD instructions, and 2 times than that with the SSE instructions. With four processor cores, we obtain the performance of 8×1098×109 interactions per second (or 300 GFLOPS). In the case of the arbitrarily shaped central forces, we can calculate 1×1091×109 and 4×1094×109 interactions per second with one and four processor cores, respectively. The performance with one processor core is 6 times and 2 times higher than those of the implementations without any use of SIMD instructions and with the SSE instructions. These performances depend only weakly on the number of particles, irrespective of the force shape. It is good contrast with the fact that the performance of force calculations accelerated by graphics processing units (GPUs) depends strongly on the number of particles. Substantially weak dependence of the performance on the number of particles is suitable to collisionless N-body simulations, since these simulations are usually performed with sophisticated N-body solvers such as Tree- and TreePM-methods combined with an individual timestep scheme. We conclude that collisionless N-body simulations accelerated with our library have significant advantage over those accelerated by GPUs, especially on massively parallel environments.

► We present a numerical software library for high-performance N-body simulation. ► The library is implemented with Intel AVX instruction set. ► We have achieved 300 GFLOPS using 4 cores, regardless of the number of particles. ► This feature is superior to the performance of external hardware accelerators.