Design of Large Scale Parallel Simulations A Case Study
Matthew Gregg Knepley, Vivek Sarin · 2000
We present an overview of the design of softwar e packages called {\em Particle Movers} that have been developed to simulate the motion of particles in two and three dimensional domains. These simulations require the solution of nonlinear Navier-Stokes equations for fluids coupled with Newton’s equations for particle dynamics. Furthermore, realistic simulations are extremely computationally intensive, and are feasible only with algorithms that can exploit parallelism effectively. We describe the computational structure of the simulation as well as the data objects required in these packages. We present a brief description of a particle mover code in this framework, and concentrating on the following features: design modularity, portability, extensibility, and parallelism. Simulations on the SGI Origin2000 demonstrate very good speedup on a large number of processors.