petar: a high-performance N-body code for modelling massive collisional stellar systems

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.