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An evaluation of computing paradigms for N-body simulations on distributed memory architectures

Published: 01 May 1999 Publication History

Abstract

The efficiency of HPF with respect to irregular applications is still largely unproven. While recent work has shown that a highly irregular hierarchical n-body force calculation method can be implemented in HPF, we have found that the implmentation contains inefficiencies which cause it to run up to a factor of three times slower than our hand-coded, explicitly parallel implementation. Our work examines these inefficiencies, determines that most of the extra overhead is due to a single aspect of the communication strategy, and demonstrates that fixing the communication strategy can bring the overheads of the HPF application to within 25% of those of the hand-coded version.

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  1. An evaluation of computing paradigms for N-body simulations on distributed memory architectures

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        Published In

        cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
        ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 34, Issue 8
        Aug. 1999
        192 pages
        ISSN:0362-1340
        EISSN:1558-1160
        DOI:10.1145/329366
        Issue’s Table of Contents
        • cover image ACM Conferences
          PPoPP '99: Proceedings of the seventh ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
          May 1999
          192 pages
          ISBN:1581131003
          DOI:10.1145/301104
          • Chairmen:
          • Marc Snir,
          • Andrew A. Chien
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        Published: 01 May 1999
        Published in SIGPLAN Volume 34, Issue 8

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