Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics with GRAPE and Parallel Virtual Machine

Abstract

We have developed Remote-GRAPE, a subroutine library to use the special purpose computer GRAPE-3A. The GRAPE-3A can efficiently calculate gravitational force between particles, and construct neighbor lists. All other calculations are performed on the host workstation (WS) which is directly connected to GRAPE. The use of GRAPE for Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (GRAPE-SPH) can in principle greatly speed up the calculations on WS. However the current bottleneck of GRAPE-SPH is that its performance is limited by the speed of the host WS. To solve this problem, we implement Remote-GRAPE; it allows us to run applications which use GRAPE-3A hardware on the significantly faster computers than the physical host WS. Thus, we can take advantage of the fast computers even though they can not physically be connected to GRAPE. The Remote-GRAPE system is implemented on the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM). In this paper, the detail of implementation and performance analysis are described.