Parallel Simulation of Ion Recombination in Nonpolar Liquids

• Main Authors: Frank J. Seinstra, Henri E. Bal, Hans J. W. Spoelder
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1997
• Subjects: parallel Monte Carlo simulation; N-body problem; Myrinet; Orca
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.471.4288; http://staff.science.uva.nl/~fjseins/Papers/Conferences/hpcn97.pdf

Abstract. Ion recombination in nonpolar liquids is an important prob-lem in radiation chemistry. We have designed and implemented a paral-lel Monte Carlo simulation for this computationally-intensive task on a network of workstations. The main problem with parallelizing this appli-cation is that the amount of work performed by each process decreases during execution, resulting in high communication overhead and load imbalances. We address this problem by dynamically adjusting the num-ber of processors that are used. We have evaluated the performance of the parallel program on two systems, one using Ethernet and the other using Myrinet. On Ethernet, the program suffers from a large communi-cation overhead. Using the Myrinet high-speed network in combination with a programming system (Orca) that is optimized for fast networks, however, the program obtains a high efficiency.