Corrfunc: Blazing fast correlation functions with AVX512F SIMD Intrinsics

Understand

Correlation functions are widely used in extra-galactic astrophysics to extract insights into how galaxies occupy dark matter halos and in cosmology to place stringent constraints on cosmological parameters.

• A correlation function fundamentally requires computing pair-wise separations between two sets of points and then computing a histogram of the separations.
• Corrfunc is an existing open-source, high-performance software package for efficiently computing a multitude of correlation functions.
• In this paper, we will discuss the SIMD AVX512F kernels within Corrfunc, capable of processing 16 floats or 8 doubles at a time.