A Performance Study of Cosmological Simulations on
Message-Passing and Shared-Memory Multiprocessors <A NAME=tex2html1 HREF="footnode.html#15"><IMG ALIGN=BOTTOM ALT="gif" SRC="http://www.astro.washington.edu/ingram/latex.dir/icons//foot_motif.gif"></A>
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A Performance Study of Cosmological Simulations on
Message-Passing and Shared-Memory Multiprocessors 
Marios D. Dikaiakos
Departments of Computer Science-Engineering and Astronomy
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195
marios@astro.washington.edu
Joachim Stadel
Department of Astronomy
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195
stadel@astro.washington.edu
March 15, 1995
Abstract:
In this paper we describe PKDGRAV, a parallel hierarchical
tree-structured code used to conduct cosmological simulations on
shared-memory and message-passing multiprocessors. We explore
performance traits of cosmological N-Body simulations on 32K to 1.3
million particles, running PKDGRAV on KSR-2 and Intel Paragon
multiprocessors with up to 128 nodes. We quantify the computation and
communication requirements of PKDGRAV and study its scalability. We
show that the shared-memory implementation performs and scales better
than the message-passing. We investigate the causes of poor
scalability of the Paragon implementation and identify an
implementation-specific performance bottleneck in the software cache
mechanism pertinent to the Paragon implementation.