Title: Cosmological Calculations on the GPU Authors: Deborah Bard, Matthew Bellis, Mark T. Allen, Hasmik Yepremyan, Jan M. Kratochvil
Cosmological measurements require the calculation of nontrivial quantities over large datasets. The next generation of survey telescopes (such as DES, PanSTARRS, and LSST) will yield measurements of billions of galaxies. The scale of these datasets, and the nature of the calculations involved, make cosmological calculations ideal models for implementation on graphics processing units (GPUs). We consider two cosmological calculations, the two-point angular correlation function and the aperture mass statistic, and aim to improve the calculation time by constructing code for calculating them on the GPU. Using CUDA, we implement the two algorithms on the GPU and compare the calculation speeds to comparable code run on the CPU. We obtain a code speed-up of between 10 - 180x faster, compared to performing the same calculation on the CPU. The code has been made publicly available.
Title: A pilgrimage to gravity on GPUs Authors: Jeroen Bédorf, Simon Portegies Zwart
In this short review we present the developments over the last 5 decades that have led to the use of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for astrophysical simulations. Since the introduction of NVIDIA's Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) in 2007 the GPU has become a valuable tool for N-body simulations and is so popular these days that almost all papers about high precision N-body simulations use methods that are accelerated by GPUs. With the GPU hardware becoming more advanced and being used for more advanced algorithms like gravitational tree-codes we see a bright future for GPU like hardware in computational astrophysics.