In the last post of this series on learning CUDA through building a gravity simulation, we didn't actually do any CUDA. We focused on defining gravity and figuring out how we were going to actually simulate it with practical equations. Now it's time to put those equations to work and see if we can come up with a functioning simulation that uses CUDA. We'll start with the simple 2-body problem of the Earth orbiting around the Sun, and see if we can keep the Earth in orbit.
We started out this series on learning CUDA by diving in and writing a couple CUDA programs that we then got up and running on an nVidia graphics card. That was a great start that gave us an immediate feeling of accomplishment, but to keep advancing toward our goal of building a multi-body gravity simulation, we're going to have to take a break from CUDA and make sure we understand gravity a bit more. Gravity can be modeled at different levels of complexity, so we'll want to decide at what level we want to model it. We'll certainly start simple, but it's still good to know enough about gravity to know where we could go if we wanted and where it's not worth it to explore.
