Applying high performance computing techniques in astrophysics

Abstract

When trying to improve the execution time of scientific applications using parallelism, two alternatives appear as the most extended: to use explicit message-passing or using a shared address memory space. MPI and OpenMP are nowadays the industrial standards for each alternative. We broach the parallelization of an astrophysics code used to measure various properties of the accretion disk in a black hole. Different parallel approaches have been implemented: pure MPI and OpenMP versions using cyclic and block distributions, a hybrid MPI+OpenMP parallelization and a MPI Master-Slave strategy. A broad computational experience on a ccNUMA SGI Origin 3000 architecture is presented. From the scientific point of view, the most profitable conclusion is the confirmation of the robustness of the technique that the original code implements. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.