Parallel implementation of an adaptive and parameter-free N-body integrator

摘要

Previously, Pruett et al. (2003) [3] described an N-body integrator of arbitrarily high order M with an asymptotic operation count of O(M ~2N~2). The algorithm's structure lends itself readily to data parallelization, which we document and demonstrate here in the integration of point-mass systems subject to Newtonian gravitation. High order is shown to benefit parallel efficiency. The resulting N-body integrator is robust, parameter-free, highly accurate, and adaptive in both time-step and order. Moreover, it exhibits linear speedup on distributed parallel processors, provided that each processor is assigned at least a handful of bodies.