Concurrent N-Body Simulation

The project was done for a course in concurrent programming at KTH.

The project evaluates two different methods of approximating an N-Body system.

1. Brute force

   This is the naive and initial approach to solving a problem like this. It is very inefficient but pretty easy to parallelize.

2. Barnes-Hut

   This is a well-known approximation method that works by dividing the bodies into sections that are either near or far away. If a cluster of bodies is far away, their effect on a specific body can be approximated as if the cluster was a single body positioned at the center of gravity.

The project also included parallelizations of the above-mentioned methods with comparisons of their efficiency. More information and the conclusions can be found in the project report.

Usage example

To run a simple test make the first program and wait for it to finish calculating. After it is done, a visualization window will pop up.

make 1

Development setup

OpenGL and a C compiler are required for this project to run. Please make sure that you have the necessary tools.

Meta

Erik Båvenstrand – Portfolio – erik@bavenstrand.se

Distributed under the MIT license. See LICENSE for more information.

github.com/ErikBavenstrand