SWIFT: task-based hydrodynamics and gravity for cosmological simulations

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. Strong scaling tests on realistic particle distributions yield excellent parallel efficiency, and efficient cache usage provides a large speed-up compared to current codes even on a single core. SWIFT is designed to be easy to use by shielding the astronomer from computational details such as the construction of the tasks or MPI communication. The techniques and algorithms used in SWIFT may benefit other computational physics areas as well, for example that of compressible hydrodynamics. For details of this open-source project, see www.swiftsim.com