Fast galactic structure finding using graphics processing units
Master Thesis
2014
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University of Cape Town
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Abstract
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.
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Includes bibliographical references.
Reference:
Wood, D. 2014. Fast galactic structure finding using graphics processing units. University of Cape Town.