Browsing by Author "Wood, Daniel"

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    Fast galactic structure finding using graphics processing units
    (2014) Wood, Daniel; Marais, Patrick; Faltenbacher, Andreas
    Cosmological simulations are used by astronomers to investigate large scale structure formation and galaxy evolution. Structure finding, that is, the discovery of gravitationally-bound objects such as dark matter halos, is a crucial step in many such simulations. During recent years, advancing computational capacity has lead to halo-finders needing to manage increasingly larger simulations. As a result, many multi-core solutions have arisen in an attempt to process these simulations more efficiently. However, a many-core approach to the problem using graphics processing units (GPUs) appears largely unexplored. Since these simulations are inherently n-body problems, they contain a high degree of parallelism, which makes them very well suited to a GPU architecture. Therefore, it makes sense to determine the potential for further research in halo-finding algorithms on a GPU.