Mercury-Opal: the GPU-accelerated version of the n-body code for planet formation Mercury-Arxes

Abstract

Large n-body simulations with fully interacting objects represent the next frontier in computational planetary formation studies. In this paper, we present Mercury-Opal, the GPU-accelerated version of the n-body planet formation code Mercury-Arxes.The porting to GPU computing has been performed through OpenACC to ensure cross-platform support and minimize the code restructuring efforts while retaining most of the performance increase expected from GPU computing. We tested Mercury-Opal against its parent code Mercury-Arxes under conditions that put GPU computing at disadvantage and nevertheless show how the GPU-based execution provides advantages with respect to CPU-serial execution even for limited computational loads.