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

Published: 01 May 1999 Publication History
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  • 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
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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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