4,935 research outputs found
An adaptive hierarchical domain decomposition method for parallel contact dynamics simulations of granular materials
A fully parallel version of the contact dynamics (CD) method is presented in
this paper. For large enough systems, 100% efficiency has been demonstrated for
up to 256 processors using a hierarchical domain decomposition with dynamic
load balancing. The iterative scheme to calculate the contact forces is left
domain-wise sequential, with data exchange after each iteration step, which
ensures its stability. The number of additional iterations required for
convergence by the partially parallel updates at the domain boundaries becomes
negligible with increasing number of particles, which allows for an effective
parallelization. Compared to the sequential implementation, we found no
influence of the parallelization on simulation results.Comment: 19 pages, 15 figures, published in Journal of Computational Physics
(2011
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
Efficient Implementations of Molecular Dynamics Simulations for Lennard-Jones Systems
Efficient implementations of the classical molecular dynamics (MD) method for
Lennard-Jones particle systems are considered. Not only general algorithms but
also techniques that are efficient for some specific CPU architectures are also
explained. A simple spatial-decomposition-based strategy is adopted for
parallelization. By utilizing the developed code, benchmark simulations are
performed on a HITACHI SR16000/J2 system consisting of IBM POWER6 processors
which are 4.7 GHz at the National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS) and an
SGI Altix ICE 8400EX system consisting of Intel Xeon processors which are 2.93
GHz at the Institute for Solid State Physics (ISSP), the University of Tokyo.
The parallelization efficiency of the largest run, consisting of 4.1 billion
particles with 8192 MPI processes, is about 73% relative to that of the
smallest run with 128 MPI processes at NIFS, and it is about 66% relative to
that of the smallest run with 4 MPI processes at ISSP. The factors causing the
parallel overhead are investigated. It is found that fluctuations of the
execution time of each process degrade the parallel efficiency. These
fluctuations may be due to the interference of the operating system, which is
known as OS Jitter.Comment: 33 pages, 19 figures, add references and figures are revise
Scalable and fast heterogeneous molecular simulation with predictive parallelization schemes
Multiscale and inhomogeneous molecular systems are challenging topics in the
field of molecular simulation. In particular, modeling biological systems in
the context of multiscale simulations and exploring material properties are
driving a permanent development of new simulation methods and optimization
algorithms. In computational terms, those methods require parallelization
schemes that make a productive use of computational resources for each
simulation and from its genesis. Here, we introduce the heterogeneous domain
decomposition approach which is a combination of an heterogeneity sensitive
spatial domain decomposition with an \textit{a priori} rearrangement of
subdomain-walls. Within this approach, the theoretical modeling and
scaling-laws for the force computation time are proposed and studied as a
function of the number of particles and the spatial resolution ratio. We also
show the new approach capabilities, by comparing it to both static domain
decomposition algorithms and dynamic load balancing schemes. Specifically, two
representative molecular systems have been simulated and compared to the
heterogeneous domain decomposition proposed in this work. These two systems
comprise an adaptive resolution simulation of a biomolecule solvated in water
and a phase separated binary Lennard-Jones fluid.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figure
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