David Ireland

This project investigates methods used to simulate N-body Systems with an N-body system being a group of N planets, stars or other bodies that all interact with each other gravitationally.

Direct integration methods, which are very accurate but slow in terms of computation, are explored and compared against the tree method, which gains speed by approximation meaning that some calculations can be skipped.

The project also utilises graphics processing unit (GPU) parallelisation to increase the speed of calculations through parallel processing.

The goal of the project is to show that N-body simulation can be efficiently run to the point where it can be used for real-time applications, such as games.