Scalable Cosmology Simulations on Parallel Machines
Filippo Gioachin (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)Amit Sharma (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Sayantan Chakravorty (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Celso Mendes (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Laxmikant Kale (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Thomas Quinn (University of Washington)
Abstract:
Cosmological simulators are currently an important component in the study of the formation of galaxies and planetary systems. However, existing simulators do not scale effectively on more recent machines 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 system 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.
Keywords:
Large Scale Simulations in all areas of Engineering and Science, Parallel and Distributed Computing
