SWIFT: task-based hydrodynamics and gravity for cosmological simulations

Understand

Simulations of galaxy formation follow the gravitational and hydrodynamical interactions between gas, stars and dark matter through cosmic time.

• The huge dynamic range of such calculations severely limits strong scaling behaviour of the community codes in use, with load-imbalance, cache inefficiencies and poor vectorisation limiting performance.
• The new swift code exploits task-based parallelism designed for many-core compute nodes interacting via MPI using asynchronous communication to improve speed and scaling.
• A graph-based domain decomposition schedules interdependent tasks over available resources.