Hardware implementation of a pipelined computational unit for N-body simulation

Abstract

This paper presents a pipelined FPGA implementation of an engine that computes Newtonian gravitational forces. The module can be incorporated in a large-scale N-body simulation as the primary component used for computing the interaction between bodies. It uses 64-bit floating point arithmetic and relies on the speed provided by the “Fast Inverse Square” root algorithm. The design was implemented and tested on an Altera DE10-Lite FPGA.