GRAPESPH: Cosmological SPH simulations with the special purpose hardware GRAPE

Abstract

A combined N--body/SPH code is presented which benefits from the high speed of the special purpose hardware GRAPE (GRAvity PipE). Besides gravitational forces, GRAPE also returns the list of neighbours and can, therefore, be used to speed up the hydrodynamical part, too. After the interaction list has been passed, density, pressure forces, propagation and interpolation of particles etc. are calculated on the front end, a 50 MHz SUN SPARC 10. In order to combine SPH and GRAPE, possible limitations due to the hardware design of GRAPE are carefully analyzed and modifications compared to current SPH codes are discussed. The resulting code, GRAPESPH, is similarly flexible as TREESPH. It seems especially well suited to investigate the formation of individual objects in a large scale structure environment, like eg. galaxies or clusters. The total performance is at least half as good as treesph on a CRAY and for most applications it seems to be even better. The CPU time per time step is only slightly dependent on the clustering state. GRAPESPH, therefore, provides a very attractive alternative to the use of supercomputers in cosmology.