The Formation of Galaxies: A Challenge for Supercomputers -- a Simple Task for GRAPE ?

Details The Formation of Galaxies: A Challenge for Supercomputers -- a Simple Task for GRAPE ? The Formation of Galaxies: A Challenge for Supercomputers -- a Simple Task for GRAPE ?

1994-02-21

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9402050v1

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

7 pages, compressed uu-encoded postscript file (116kB), contribution to the exhibition on High Performance Computing and Netwo

Scientific paper

We present numerical simulations of galaxy formation, one of the most challenging problems in computational astrophysics. The key point in such simulations is the efficient solution of the N--body problem. If the gas of a galaxy is treated by means of smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), the hydrodynamic equations can be reduced to a form similar to that of the N--body problem. A straightforward implementation requires a computational effort $\propto N^2$, making it prohibitively expensive to simulate systems larger than $10^5$ particles even on the largest available supercomputers. After a description of the physical and numerical problems, we shortly review the standard numerical methods to tackle these problems and discuss their advantages and drawbacks. We also present a completely different approach to perform such simulations using a workstation in combination with the special purpose hardware {\sc Grape}. After a discussion of the main features of {\sc Grape}, we present a simple implementation of a {\sc SPH}--N--body code on such a configuration. Comparing results and performance of these two approaches, we show, that with an investment of US \$ 50000, the problem can be solved up to 5 times faster than on a {\sc Cray} YMP.

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