Fast and Accurate P 3 M Cosmological Simulations Using a Hardware Accelerator

Abstract

We implemented a fast and accurate particle-particle particle-mesh (P3M) method using MDGRAPE-2, a hardware accelerator for arbitrary central forces. The results of cosmological N-body simulations using the MDGRAPE-2 P3M method agree with those using other P3M methods. We measured calculation times required for the MDGRAPE-2 P3M method on the system of a PC and one MDGRAPE-2 board. When we reduce memory requirement, the MDGRAPE-2 P3M method is ~10 and ~20 times faster than the adaptive and original P3M methods on the PC, respectively, under heavy particle clustering. When each P3M method is optimized for performance, the MDGRAPE-2 P3M method is as fast as the adaptive P3M method and ~10 times faster than the original P3M method.