Abstract
Several particle simulation algorithms, such as the Barnes-Hut [1] and the Fast Multipole method [2], proceed by hierarchically decomposing the simulation space and representing the distribution of the simulated particles in an adaptive tree data structure which varies as the simulation proceeds. Such tree structures are also used in radiosity calculation, computational fluid mechanics, and other applications. Managing such a structure on a distributed-memory machine poses significant difficulties in terms of communication costs and partitioning strategies. The irregular nature of the structures rules out the usual optimization techniques used with arrays. Hand-coding these irregular and dynamic data structures is error-prone and not easily portable.
This research was supported in part by grant N00014-93-1-0114 from ONR and CCR8908285 from NSF.
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References
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Pai, A.S., Choo, Yi., Chen, M. (1996). Distributed Tree Structures for N-Body Simulation. In: Szymanski, B.K., Sinharoy, B. (eds) Languages, Compilers and Run-Time Systems for Scalable Computers. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-2315-4_28
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-2315-4_28
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