  We present magneto-hydrodynamic simulation results for heterogeneous systems.
Heterogeneous architectures combine high floating point performance many-core
units hosted in conventional server nodes. Examples include Graphics Processing
Units (GPU's) and Cell. They have potentially large gains in performance, at
modest power and monetary cost. We implemented a magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD)
simulation code on a variety of heterogeneous and multi-core architectures ---
multi-core x86, Cell, Nvidia and ATI GPU --- in different languages, FORTRAN,
C, Cell, CUDA and OpenCL. We present initial performance results for these
systems. To our knowledge, this is the widest comparison of heterogeneous
systems for MHD simulations. We review the different challenges faced in each
architecture, and potential bottlenecks. We conclude that substantial gains in
performance over traditional systems are possible, and in particular that is
possible to extract a greater percentage of peak theoretical performance from
some systems when compared to x86 architectures.
