PHoToNs-A parallel heterogeneous and threads oriented code for cosmological N-body simulation

• Published in: Research in astronomy and astrophysics Vol. 18; no. 6
• Main Authors: Wang, Qiao, Cao, Zong-Yan, Gao, Liang, Chi, Xue-Bin, Meng, Chen, Wang, Jie, Wang, Long
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Beijing National Astronomical Observatories, CAS and IOP Publishing Ltd 01.06.2018; IOP Publishing
• Subjects: Algorithms; Computer simulation; dark matter; Domains; Finite element method; galaxies: interactions; Hilbert curve; methods: numerical; Photons; Self-similarity; Synchronism
• ISSN: 1674-4527
• DOI: 10.1088/1674-4527/18/6/62

We introduce a new code for cosmological simulations, PHoToNs, which incorporates features for performing massive cosmological simulations on heterogeneous high performance computer (HPC) systems and threads oriented programming. PHoToNs adopts a hybrid scheme to compute gravitational force, with the conventional Particle-Mesh (PM) algorithm to compute the long-range force, the Tree algorithm to compute the short range force and the direct summation Particle-Particle (PP) algorithm to compute gravity from very close particles. A self-similar space filling a Peano-Hilbert curve is used to decompose the computing domain. Threads programming is advantageously used to more flexibly manage the domain communication, PM calculation and synchronization, as well as Dual Tree Traversal on the CPU+MIC platform. PHoToNs scales well and efficiency of the PP kernel achieves 68.6% of peak performance on MIC and 74.4% on CPU platforms. We also test the accuracy of the code against the much used Gadget-2 in the community and found excellent agreement.