A highly scalable and efficient parallel design of N-body simulation on FPGA

N-Body simulation simulates the evolution of a system that is composed of N particles, where each element receives a force that is due to the interaction with all the other elements within the system. Usually, the influence of external physical forces, such as gravity, is involved too. This methodology is widely used in different fields that range from astrophysics, where it is used to study the interaction of celestial objects, to molecular dynamics, where the bodies are represented by molecules. Although its wide range of applicability, the algorithm presents a high computational complexity that requires the usage of powerful and high power consuming computers. An acceleration on a reconfigurable device, such as an FPGA, would benefit both in term of performance and power consumption. In this work we presents a scalable, high performance and highly efficient implementation of an N-Body simulation algorithm on FPGA. The final design is able to outperform both CPU and FPGA works in the state of the art in terms of pure performance of a factor up to 10x, and high-end GPUs in terms of performance per watt by a factor of 1.84x.