A Comparative Study on ASIC, FPGAs, GPUs and General Purpose Processors in the O(N^2) Gravitational N-body Simulation

In this paper, we describe the implementation of gravitational force calculation for N-body simulations in the context of astrophysics. It will describe high performance implementations on general purpose processors, GPUs, and FPGAs, and compare them using a number of criteria including speed performance, power efficiency and cost of development. These results show that, for gravitational force calculation and many-body simulations in general, GPUs are very competitive in terms of performance and performance per dollar figures, whereas FPGAs are competitive in terms of performance per Watt figures.