2000/01/15 by Gene Cooperman, Luis Anchordoqui, Cooperman, Gene +13
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Data Storage Technologies #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #Distributed and Parallel Computing Systems #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques #astro-ph #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.hep-ph/0001144
To appear in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics, CHEP2000, Padova, Italy, February 7-11, 2000
arxiv created 2000/01/15 · openalex publication_date 2000/01/15 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We describe a scalable parallelization of Geant4 using commodity hardware in a collaborative effort between the College of Computer Science and the Department of Physics at Northeastern University. The system consists of a Beowulf cluster of 32 Pentium II processors with 128 MBytes of memory each, connected via ATM and fast Ethernet. The bulk of the parallelization is done using TOP-C (Task Oriented Parallel C), software widely used in the computational algebra community. TOP-C provides a flexible and powerful framework for parallel algorithm development, is easy to learn, and is available at no cost. Its task oriented nature allows one to parallelize legacy code while hiding the details of interprocess communications. Applications include fast interactive simulation of computationally intensive processes such as electromagnetic showers. General results motivate wider applications of TOP-C to other simulation problems as well as to pattern recognition in high energy physics.