Parallel Out-of-core Methods for N-body Simulation

In the 8th SIAM Conf. on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing, 1997

Abstract:

Hierarchical treecodes have, to a large extent, converted the compute-bound N-body problem into a memory-bound problem. The large ratio of DRAM to disk pricing suggests use of out-of-core techniques to overcome memory capacity limitations. We will describe a parallel, out-of-core treecode library, targeted at machines with independent secondary storage associated with each processor. Borrowing the space-filling curve techniques from our in-core library, and ``manually'' paging, results in excellent spatial and temporal locality and very good performance.


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John Salmon