High-Performance N-Body Simulation

A high-performance astronomical simulation capable of simulating over 1 million bodies in real-time. This project leverages CUDA for GPU acceleration and OpenMP for multi-core CPU processing, implementing the efficient Barnes-Hut algorithm (O(n log n)) to handle massive scale interactions.

Features

• Massive Scale: Simulates 1,000,000+ astronomical objects.
• Utilizes:
  • Custom CUDA kernels for GPU parallelism.
  • OpenMP for multi-threaded execution (CPU Parallelism).
  • Barnes-Hut tree algorithm for efficient force calculation.
• Generates high-resolution video visualizations of the universe evolution.
• Built with C++20.

Quick Start

Prerequisites

• CMake (3.10+)
• C++20 Compiler
• CUDA Toolkit (11.0+)

Build & Run

The project is organized into labs. lab_3 contains the final, most advanced implementation.

cd lab_3
mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. && make

# Run simulation with CUDA (Mode 4) for 1000 bodies
./source/lab --num-bodies 1000 --simulation-mode 4

Simulation Modes

• 0: Sequential (Baseline)
• 1: Parallel CPU (OpenMP)
• 2: Barnes-Hut (Tree-based)
• 4: CUDA (GPU Accelerated)

Visualization

The simulation outputs frame data which can be rendered into video:

# Inside the build directory after running a simulation
../create_mp4.sh

Generates out.mp4 showing the universe evolution.