How to Build and Use Special Purpose PC Clusters in Stellar Dynamics

Computer Science – Performance

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

The advent of special purpose GRAPE (GRAvity PipE) chips and boards by astronomers in Tokyo has given a boost to the field of gravothermal stellar dynamics, dense stellar systems in which two-body relaxation effects cannot be neglected. Recently, GRAPE boards are used in parallel PC clusters world wide. An overview will be given from a users viewpoint of how to build and operate such a GRAPE cluster (with a focus on experiences with the Heidelberg and Rochester clusters); it is discussed what kinds of software we have suitable for such clusters and how its performance scales, with a focus on direct high-accuracy N-body codes. Typical astrophysical applications like dynamical simulations of globular clusters and galactic nuclei with massive black holes will be shown as examples what can be achieved with present hardware and software. Finally, new perspectives to use reconfigurable hardware (FPGA, MPRACE) used in addition to (in the future possibly instead of) the GRAPE, are presented, together with first benchmarks obtained from the Heidelberg GRACE cluster (GRAPE + MPRACE). This paper partly presents results obtained within the collaborations GRACE http://www.ari.uni-heidelberg.de/grace (Heidelberg), grapecluster http://www.cs.rit.edu/~grapecluster/ (Rochester), RSDN http://www.ari.uni-heidelberg.de/rsdn/ (Rhine Stell. Dyn. Network)

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