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Load-Balancing and Performance of a Gridless Particle Simulation on MIMD, SIMD, and Vector Supercomputers

Conference ·
OSTI ID:5754386
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  1. Sandia National Laboratories (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)

Our charged particle simulation models a relativistic electron beam for which the field solution is local and thus requires no grid. We have implemented the simulation on a CRAY and on two parallel machines, a nCUBE 2 and Connection Machine. We present implementation details and contrast the approaches necessary for the three architectures. On the parallel machines a dynamic load-balancing problem arises because the beam grows uniformly in one dimension from a few hundred to hundreds of thousands of particles as the simulation progresses. We discuss a folded Gray-code mapping of the processors to the length scale of the simulation that expands (or shrinks) as the beam changes length so as to minimize inter-processor communication. This improves the efficiency of the nCUBE version of the simulation which runs at 10x the speed of the vectorized CRAY version.

Research Organization:
Sandia National Laboratories (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC)
DOE Contract Number:
AC04-76DP00789
OSTI ID:
5754386
Report Number(s):
SAND--90-2671C; CONF-9104265--1; ON: DE91013758
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English