Parallel N-body simulations of planetary systems: a direct approach

Abstract

Direct gravitational simulations of n-body systems have a time complexity O(n^2), which gets computationally expensive as the number of bodies increases. Distributing this workload to multiple cores significantly speeds up the computation and is the fundamental principle behind parallel computing. This project simulates (evolves) our solar system for the next 1000 years (from 2015 to 3015) on the BlueCrystal supercomputer. The gravitational bodies (planets, moons, asteroids) were successfully simulated, and the initial states (mass, position and velocity vectors) of the solar system objects were obtained via NASA's JPL Horizons web interface. Two parallel computing domains are investigated: shared and distributed memory systems.