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Title: Parallel implementation of many-body mean-field equations

Journal Article · · Physical Review. E, Statistical Physics, Plasmas, Fluids, and Related Interdisciplinary Topics; (United States)
; ; ;  [1]
  1. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee 37235 (United States) Center for Computationally Intensive Physics, Physics Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37831-6373 (United States) Department of Physics and Atmospheric Sciences, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104 (United States)

We describe the numerical methods used to solve the system of stiff, nonlinear partial differential equations resulting from the Hartree-Fock description of many-particle quantum systems, as applied to the structure of the nucleus. The solutions are performed on a three-dimensional Cartesian lattice. Discretization is achieved through the lattice basis-spline collocation method, in which quantum-state vectors and coordinate-space operators are expressed in terms of basis-spline functions on a spatial lattice. All numerical procedures reduce to a series of matrix-vector multiplications and other elementary operations, which we perform on a number of different computing architectures, including the Intel Paragon and the Intel iPSC/860 hypercube. Parallelization is achieved through a combination of mechanisms employing the Gram-Schmidt procedure, broadcasts, global operations, and domain decomposition of state vectors. We discuss the approach to the problems of limited node memory and node-to-node communication overhead inherent in using distributed-memory, multiple-instruction, multiple-data stream parallel computers. An algorithm was developed to reduce the communication overhead by pipelining some of the message passing procedures.

DOE Contract Number:
AC05-84OR21400; FG05-87ER40376
OSTI ID:
7055864
Journal Information:
Physical Review. E, Statistical Physics, Plasmas, Fluids, and Related Interdisciplinary Topics; (United States), Vol. 50:6; ISSN 1063-651X
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English