A GPU accelerated Barnes-Hut Tree Code for FLASH4

Abstract: We present a GPU accelerated CUDA-C implementation of the Barnes Hut (BH) tree code for calculating the gravitational potential on octree adaptive meshes. The tree code algorithm is implemented within the FLASH4 adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) code framework and therefore fully MPI parallel. We describe the algorithm and present test results that demonstrate its accuracy and performance in comparison to the algorithms available in the current FLASH4 version. We use a MacLaurin spheroid to test the accuracy of our new implementation and use spherical, collapsing cloud cores with effective AMR to carry out performance tests also in comparison with previous gravity solvers. Depending on the setup and the GPU/CPU ratio, we find a speedup for the gravity unit of at least a factor of 3 and up to 60 in comparison to the gravity solvers implemented in the FLASH4 code. We find an overall speedup factor for full simulations of at least factor 1.6 up to a factor of 10