Project 1: N Body Simulation

Overview

This project focuses on developing an efficient and accurate N-body simulation system using high-performance computing techniques. The N-body problem is crucial in fields like astrophysics, cosmology, and aerodynamics, involving the simulation of the motion of a system of particles under the influence of gravitational forces.

Key Objectives

• Algorithm Development: Create an N-body simulation algorithm that can be parallelized efficiently.
• Optimization: Reduce communication overhead and load balancing issues in the parallelization process.
• High-Performance Implementation: Implement the simulation on a high-performance computing architecture to handle large-scale systems.
• Scalability: Investigate and ensure the scalability of the developed algorithm.

Methodology

• Cell Lists Algorithm: Utilizes a grid of cells to reduce computational complexity by focusing on local interactions.
• Leapfrog Time Integration: Ensures accurate propagation of particle positions and velocities.
• Parallelization Techniques: Combines OpenMP for parallel processing within nodes and MPI for communication between nodes.
• Performance Analysis: Conducts roofline and scaling analyses to evaluate the efficiency and scalability of the algorithm.

Findings

• Efficiency Gains: The parallelized algorithm demonstrates significant improvements in computation time.
• Scalability: The algorithm scales well with the number of processors, though efficiency decreases with increased communication overhead.

Conclusion

The project successfully develops a highly scalable and efficient N-body simulation system, advancing the computational techniques available for simulating large-scale particle interactions.

Repository and Resources

To read the full analysis, you can download the PDF file.