Exploring Structured Adaptive Mesh Refinement (SAMR) Methods with the Illinois Concert System

Structured Adaptive Mesh Refinement (SAMR) simulation methods are attractive because they can increase computational efficiency dramatically. However, their irregular and less predictable computational and data structure makes them challenging to parallelize efficiently on large-scale parallel machines. We use the Illinois Concert C++ system (which supports dynamic, object-based parallelism) to build a flexible SAMR code for the Cosmology NSF Grand Challenge. The Concert System provides language support to ease the expression of the dynamic parallelism, as well as compiler and runtime support for efficient execution. We plan to perform analysis for the Cray T3D and SGI high-performance architectures. Evaluation of the code's achieved sequential performance, and the benefits of using the Illinois Concert system (and parallel object systems in general) for adaptive methods indicates that the code will benefit from parallelization, with sequential times being within a factor of 1.2 to 1.6..