Communications Overlapping in Fast Multipole Particle Dynamics Methods
The research described in this product was performed in part in the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a national scientific user facility sponsored by the Department of Energy's Office of Biological and Environmental Research and located at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. In molecular dynamics the fast multipole method (FMM) is an attractive alternative to Ewald summation for calculating electrostatic interactions due to the operation counts. However when applied to small particle systems and taken to many processors it has a high demand for interprocessor communication. In a distributed memory environment this demand severely limits applicability of the FMM to systems with O(10 K atoms). We present an algorithm that allows for fine grained overlap of communication and computation, while not sacrificing synchronization and determinism in the equations of motion. The method avoids contention in the communication subsystem making it feasible to use the FMM for smaller systems on larger numbers of processors. Our algorithm also facilitates application of multiple time stepping techniques within the FMM. We present scaling at a reasonably high level of accuracy compared with optimized Ewald methods.
- Research Organization:
- Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States). Environmental Molecular Sciences Lab. (EMSL)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-76RL01830
- OSTI ID:
- 921868
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Computational Physics, 203(2):731-743, Journal Name: Journal of Computational Physics, 203(2):731-743
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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