An N-body Tree Algorithm for the Cray T3D

Abstract

We describe in this paper an algorithm for solving the gravitational N-body problem using tree data structures on the Cray T3D parallel supercomputer. This implementation is an adaptation of previous work where this problem was solved using an SIMD, fine-grained parallel computer. We show here that this approach lends itself, with small modifications, to more coarse-grained parallelism as well. We also show that the performance of the algorithm on the Cray T3D parallel architecture scales adequately with the number of processors (up to 256). Specific levels to be reached using the Cray T3D parallel architecture. A peak performance level of 9.6 Gflop/s is reached on 256 processors for the time critical gravity computation.