Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants

Accelerating the Computation and Verification of Molecular Collision Models: A Case Study in Legacy Code Parallelization

Department

School of Computing & Information Systems

College

Padnos College of Engineering and Computing

Date Range

2011-2012

Abstract

This research project constituted a case study in computational science: applying modern parallel computing techniques to a mathematical model used to solve a scientific problem. The problem involved a physical chemistry model that evaluates simulations of molecular collision experiments, implemented via a 15,000-line FORTRAN 77 code. This problem was chosen for parallelization because of its scientific importance, its computational complexity, and its overall structure that was amenable to parallelization. Since the original program was written, experimental designs have changed in a way that require significant increases in execution time for the simulation. To address this issue, the simulation code was profiled, analyzed, and parallelized using the OpenMP/multithreaded paradigm. Nearly linear speedup was measured for the OpenMP version executing on a 16-core multiprocessor. Furthermore, experimental results suggest these speedups should scale well with an increasing number of processors.

Conference Name

Intl. Conf. on Parallel and Distributed Processing, Techniques, and Applications

Conference Location

Las Vegas, NV

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