Speaker
Dr
Mario Spera
(INAF - Astronomical Observatory of Padova)
Description
Computational physics has experienced a fast growth in the last few years, also thanks to the advent of new technologies, such as that of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). GPUs are currently used for a plethora of scientific applications. In particular, in computational astrophysics, GPUs can speed up the solution to many problems like data processing and the study dynamical evolution of stellar systems. The gain in terms of performance can be by more than a factor 100 with respect to the use of Central Processing Units (CPUs) alone.
In this talk I will show some techniques and strategies adopted to speed up the
classical newtonian N-body problem using GPUs and I will present HiGPUs, a fully parallel, direct N-body code developed at the Dep. of Physics, Sapienza, Univ. of Roma.
I will also discuss several promising applications of GPUs in astrophysics concerning high energy phenomena like the mutual interaction of black holes and the dynamical evolution of dense stellar environments around supermassive black holes.
Although the main applications of this code are in Astrophysics,
some of the techniques discussed in this talk are of general validity and can be efficiently applied to other branches of physics like, for example, electrodynamics and QCD. For this reason, my talk is a fruitful link among themes discussed in this Pisa Meeting and the one (Perspectives of GPU computing in Physics and Astrophysics) which is held in Rome, September 15-17 2014.
Primary author
Dr
Mario Spera
(INAF - Astronomical Observatory of Padova)
