Parallel computation of automatic differentiation applied to magnetic field calculations
CA (United States) Lawrence Berkeley Lab., R Hinkins, USDOE, Washington, DC (United States), CA (United States). Information and Computing Sciences Div.] [Lawrence Berkeley Lab. · 1994
The author presents a parallelization of an accelerator physics application to simulate magnetic field in three dimensions. The problem involves the evaluation of high order derivatives with respect to two variables of a multivariate function. Automatic differentiation software had been used with some success, but the computation time was prohibitive. The implementation runs on several platforms, including a network of workstations using PVM, a MasPar using MPFortran, and a CM-5 using CMFortran. A careful examination of the code led to several optimizations that improved its serial performance by a factor of 8.7. The parallelization produced further improvements, especially on the MasPar with a speedup factor of 620. As a result a problem that took six days on a SPARC 10/41 now runs in minutes on the MasPar, making it feasible for physicists at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory to simulate larger magnets.