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Phys. Rev. E 70, 026703 (2004) [9 pages]

Evolution of time horizons in parallel and grid simulations

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L. N. Shchur1,2,* and M. A. Novotny1,†
1Department of Physics and Astronomy and ERC Center for Computational Sciences, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, Mississippi 39762-5167, USA
2Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, 142432 Chernogolovka, Russia

Received 12 January 2004; published 25 August 2004

We analyze the evolution of the local simulation times (LST) in parallel discrete event simulations. The new ingredients introduced are (i) we associate the LST with the nodes and not with the processing elements, and (ii) we propose to minimize the exchange of information between different processing elements by freezing the LST on the boundaries between processing elements for some time of processing and then releasing them by a wide-stream memory exchange between processing elements. The highlights of our approach are (i) it keeps the highest level of processor time utilization during the algorithm evolution, (ii) it takes a reasonable time for the memory exchange, excluding the time consuming and complicated process of message exchange between processors, and (iii) the communication between processors is decoupled from the calculations performed on a processor. The effectiveness of our algorithm grows with the number of nodes (or threads). This algorithm should be applicable for any parallel simulation with short-range interactions, including parallel or grid simulations of partial differential equations.

© 2004 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevE.70.026703
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevE.70.026703
PACS:
05.10.−a, 89.20.−a, 02.50.Fz

*Electronic address: lev@itp.ac.ru

Electronic address: novotny@erc.msstate.edu