nTersect get all starry eyed with the power of the GPU.

Calculations to simulate how a star cluster would interact with a black hole have been posted on the NVIDIA blog nTersect showing the effects of the black hole on the stars.

Needless to say it ends badly for the star cluster – the demo was calculated on 2 Tesla GPU’s running on custom software.

“We compared our software with various processor technologies, using both single precision and double precision floating point arithmetic. The results were dramatic — just one Tesla C1060 GPU ran 330 times faster than 2 Quad Core Intel Xeon 2.00 GHz CPUs for a star system with N=7680 stars. When we added the 2nd Tesla C1060 GPU, the application ran two times as fast.”