9,967 research outputs found
Event-Driven Molecular Dynamics in Parallel
Although event-driven algorithms have been shown to be far more efficient
than time-driven methods such as conventional molecular dynamics, they have not
become as popular. The main obstacle seems to be the difficulty of
parallelizing event-driven molecular dynamics. Several basic ideas have been
discussed in recent years, but to our knowledge no complete implementation has
been published yet. In this paper we present a parallel event-driven algorithm
including dynamic load-balancing, which can be easily implemented on any
computer architecture. To simplify matters our explanations refer to a basic
multi-particle system of hard spheres, but can be extended easily to a wide
variety of possible models.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure
Tackling Exascale Software Challenges in Molecular Dynamics Simulations with GROMACS
GROMACS is a widely used package for biomolecular simulation, and over the
last two decades it has evolved from small-scale efficiency to advanced
heterogeneous acceleration and multi-level parallelism targeting some of the
largest supercomputers in the world. Here, we describe some of the ways we have
been able to realize this through the use of parallelization on all levels,
combined with a constant focus on absolute performance. Release 4.6 of GROMACS
uses SIMD acceleration on a wide range of architectures, GPU offloading
acceleration, and both OpenMP and MPI parallelism within and between nodes,
respectively. The recent work on acceleration made it necessary to revisit the
fundamental algorithms of molecular simulation, including the concept of
neighborsearching, and we discuss the present and future challenges we see for
exascale simulation - in particular a very fine-grained task parallelism. We
also discuss the software management, code peer review and continuous
integration testing required for a project of this complexity.Comment: EASC 2014 conference proceedin
The Parallelism Motifs of Genomic Data Analysis
Genomic data sets are growing dramatically as the cost of sequencing
continues to decline and small sequencing devices become available. Enormous
community databases store and share this data with the research community, but
some of these genomic data analysis problems require large scale computational
platforms to meet both the memory and computational requirements. These
applications differ from scientific simulations that dominate the workload on
high end parallel systems today and place different requirements on programming
support, software libraries, and parallel architectural design. For example,
they involve irregular communication patterns such as asynchronous updates to
shared data structures. We consider several problems in high performance
genomics analysis, including alignment, profiling, clustering, and assembly for
both single genomes and metagenomes. We identify some of the common
computational patterns or motifs that help inform parallelization strategies
and compare our motifs to some of the established lists, arguing that at least
two key patterns, sorting and hashing, are missing
A hybrid MPI-OpenMP scheme for scalable parallel pseudospectral computations for fluid turbulence
A hybrid scheme that utilizes MPI for distributed memory parallelism and
OpenMP for shared memory parallelism is presented. The work is motivated by the
desire to achieve exceptionally high Reynolds numbers in pseudospectral
computations of fluid turbulence on emerging petascale, high core-count,
massively parallel processing systems. The hybrid implementation derives from
and augments a well-tested scalable MPI-parallelized pseudospectral code. The
hybrid paradigm leads to a new picture for the domain decomposition of the
pseudospectral grids, which is helpful in understanding, among other things,
the 3D transpose of the global data that is necessary for the parallel fast
Fourier transforms that are the central component of the numerical
discretizations. Details of the hybrid implementation are provided, and
performance tests illustrate the utility of the method. It is shown that the
hybrid scheme achieves near ideal scalability up to ~20000 compute cores with a
maximum mean efficiency of 83%. Data are presented that demonstrate how to
choose the optimal number of MPI processes and OpenMP threads in order to
optimize code performance on two different platforms.Comment: Submitted to Parallel Computin
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