petar: a high-performance N-body code for modelling massive collisional stellar systems
Long Wang, Masaki Iwasawa, Keigo Nitadori, Junichiro Makino
Abstract
ABSTRACT The numerical simulations of massive collisional stellar systems, such as globular clusters (GCs), are very time consuming. Until now, only a few realistic million-body simulations of GCs with a small fraction of binaries ($5{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$) have been performed by using the nbody6++gpu code. Such models took half a year computational time on a Graphic Processing Unit (GPU)-based supercomputer. In this work, we develop a new N-body code, petar, by combining the methods of Barnes–Hut tree, Hermite integrator and slow-down algorithmic regularization. The code can accurately handle an arbitrary fraction of multiple systems (e.g. binaries and triples) while keeping a high performance by using the hybrid parallelization methods with mpi, openmp, simd instructions and GPU. A few benchmarks indicate that petar and nbody6++gpu have a very good agreement on the long-term evolution of the global structure, binary orbits and escapers. On a highly configured GPU desktop computer, the performance of a million-body simulation with all stars in binaries by using petar is 11 times faster than that of nbody6++gpu. Moreover, on the Cray XC50 supercomputer, petar well scales when number of cores increase. The 10 million-body problem, which covers the region of ultracompact dwarfs and nuclear star clusters, becomes possible to be solved.