50 GFlops molecular dynamics on the Connection Machine 5

• Published in: Proceedings of the 1993 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing pp. 520 - 527
• Main Authors: Lomdahl, P. S., Tamayo, P., Grønbech-Jensen, N., Beazley, D. M.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 01.12.1993; IEEE
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Applied computing > Physical sciences and engineering > Physics; Atomic measurements; Computer systems organization > Architectures > Distributed architectures > Grid computing; Computer systems organization > Architectures > Parallel architectures; Computer systems organization > Architectures > Parallel architectures > Multicore architectures; Computer systems organization > Architectures > Serial architectures > Superscalar architectures; Computing methodologies > Modeling and simulation; Computing methodologies > Modeling and simulation > Simulation types and techniques > Massively parallel and high-performance simulations; Concurrent computing; Dynamic range; Laboratories; Liquids; Materials science and technology; Physics; Production; Software and its engineering > Software organization and properties > Software system structures > Distributed systems organizing principles > Grid computing; Solids; Timing
• ISBN: 0818643404; 9780818643408
• ISSN: 1063-9535
• DOI: 10.1145/169627.169794

The authors present timings and performances numbers for a new short range three dimensional (3-D) molecular dynamics (MD) code, SPaSM, on the Connection Machine-5 (CM-5). They demonstrate that runs with more than 10/sup 8/ particles are now possible on massively parallel MIMD computers. To the best of their knowledge this is at least an order of magnitude more particles than what was previously been reported. Typical production runs show sustained performance (including communication) in the range of 47-50 GFlops on a 1024 node CM-5 with vector units (VUs). The speed of the code scales linearly with the number of processors and with the number of particles and shows 95% parallel efficiency in the speedup.