Acceleration of Gravitation Field Analysis for Asteroids by GPU Computation

Researches with explorations by space probes for asteroids have been performed actively to approach to the origin of the solar system and life. One of methods toward the goal is analyzing structure of solar system bodies by numerical simulation. GFandSlope is a code which calculates the gravitation field, slope, and attraction of given model data for small solar system bodies. When we use the existing sequential computation code, it is inevitable to take large time to analyze high resolution models with different initial conditions. This work achieved to compute several thousands faster than the previous by GPU implementation, which will also boost researches in the field of space science. This paper presents the evaluation of our GPU codes for fast gravitation field analysis and discusses numerical precision in floating point operations on the GPU for practical application.