An Accelerating Solution for N-Body MOND Simulation with FPGA-SoC

Abstract

As a modified-gravity proposal to handle the dark matter problem on galactic scales, Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) has shown a great success. However, the N-body MOND simulation is quite challenged by its computation complexity, which appeals to acceleration of the simulation calculation. In this paper, we present a highly integrated accelerating solution for N-body MOND simulations. By using the FPGA-SoC, which integrates both FPGA and SoC (system on chip) in one chip, our solution exhibits potentials for better performance, higher integration, and lower power consumption. To handle the calculation bottleneck of potential summation, on one hand, we develop a strategy to simplify the pipeline, in which the square calculation task is conducted by the DSP48E1 of Xilinx 7 series FPGAs, so as to reduce the logic resource utilization of each pipeline; on the other hand, advantages of particle-mesh scheme are taken to overcome the bottleneck on bandwidth. Our experiment results show that 2 more pipelines can be integrated in Zynq-7020 FPGA-SoC with the simplified pipeline, and the bandwidth requirement is reduced significantly. Furthermore, our accelerating solution has a full range of advantages over different processors. Compared with GPU, our work is about 10 times better in performance per watt and 50% better in performance per cost.