Parallel simulation of ion recombination in nonpolar liquids

Ion recombination in nonpolar liquids is an important problem in radiation chemistry. We have designed and implemented a parallel Monte Carlo simulation for this computationally intensive task on a network of workstations. The main problem with parallelizing this application is that the amount of wo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Future generation computer systems 1998-03, Vol.13 (4), p.261-268
Main Authors: Seinstra, Frank J., Bal, Henri E., Spoelder, Hans J.W.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Myrinet
N-body problem
Orca
Parallel Monte Carlo simulation
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Summary:Ion recombination in nonpolar liquids is an important problem in radiation chemistry. We have designed and implemented a parallel Monte Carlo simulation for this computationally intensive task on a network of workstations. The main problem with parallelizing this application 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 number 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 communication 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.
ISSN:0167-739X
1872-7115
DOI:10.1016/S0167-739X(97)00028-9