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``Hybrid'' Parallelism

Parallel Swendsen-Wang cluster algorithms for moderate sized lattices work fairly efficiently for moderate numbers of nodes on a MIMD machine. However, this does not prevent us from using massively parallel MIMD machines with nodes for this problem.

Can use a hybrid of domain (data) parallelism and independent parallelism (over different MC runs). For example, can run 8 independent simulations of 64 nodes each on a 512-node machine.

This gives much better performance than running parallel cluster algorithms on vector supercomputers, since these applications do not vectorize well.



Paul Coddington, Northeast Parallel Architectures Center at Syracuse University, paulc@npac.syr.edu