Researchers from three countries modeled planet-disk interactions to explain how gas giants form from interstellar gas and dust around a proto-star.
The simulations required immense computing power for hydrodynamics and radiation transfer, which would have taken up to a million CPU hours.
The team developed the publicly available FARGO3D code using CUDA to handle these processes.
A cluster of Tesla K20 GPUs powered by the NVIDIA Kepler architecture ran each model within hours, achieving a 40x speedup on one GPU versus one CPU core.
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Ever wondered how the planets like Jupiter formed? A team of researchers used a cluster of Tesla GPUs to make a breakthrough discovery, finally explaining how gas giants are formed.
United by a common expertise in planet-disk interactions, four researchers from three countries recently set out to close this gap between theory and observation. They took on the challenge of modelling the physics between protoplanets and the protoplanetary disk. A gas giant forms from instellar gas and dust of a distant proto-star.
Running these simulations is no simple feat. They demand immense computing power, capable of modeling the hydrodynamics of the gaseous nebula surrounding an ever growing and moving celestial body, and also of computing the transfer of radiation within this nebula. Running all their models would have taken up a million CPU hours. That’s why the research team chose a cluster of Tesla K20 GPUs instead.
Using CUDA helped the researchers develop a publicly available code, called FARGO3D, which accounts for all the hydrodynamics and radiation transfer processes. Powered by the NVIDIA Kepler GPU architecture, the Tesla K20 cluster could run this code on each of the authors’ models within hours — gaining a 40x speedup on one GPU versus one CPU core. Read more on the NVIDIA Corporate Blog >>
About Brad Nemire
Brad Nemire leads the Developer Communications team at NVIDIA. Prior to NVIDIA, he worked at Arm on the Developer Relations team. Brad graduated from San Diego State University and currently resides in Silicon Valley.
