1998/12/21 by G. Korniss, M. A. Novotny, Per Arne Rikvold +1 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Algorithm #Asynchronous communication #Asynchrony (computer programming) #Block (permutation group theory) #Cellular automaton #Computer science #Markov Chains and Monte Carlo Methods #Massively parallel #Mathematics #Monte Carlo algorithm #Monte Carlo method #Parallel algorithm #Parallel computing #Physics #Poisson distribution #Range (aeronautics) #Scalability #Spins #Stochastic cellular automaton #Stochastic processes and statistical mechanics #Theoretical and Computational Physics #cond-mat.mtrl-sci #cond-mat.stat-mech #cs.DC #physics.comp-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1006/jcph.1999.6291
published as J. Comput. Phys. 153, 488 (1999) · 17 pages, 7 figures, RevTex; submitted to the Journal of Computational Physics
arxiv created 1998/12/21 · openalex publication_date 1999/08/01 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
We experiment with a massively parallel implementation of an algorithm for simulating the dynamics of metastable decay in kinetic Ising models. The parallel scheme is directly applicable to a wide range of stochastic cellular automata where the discrete events (updates) are Poisson arrivals. For high performance, we utilize a continuous-time, asynchronous parallel version of the n-fold way rejection-free algorithm. Each processing element carries an lxl block of spins, and we employ the fast SHMEM-library routines on the Cray T3E distributed-memory parallel architecture. Different processing elements have different local simulated times. To ensure causality, the algorithm handles the asynchrony in a conservative fashion. Despite relatively low utilization and an intricate relationship between the average time increment and the size of the spin blocks, we find that for sufficiently large l the algorithm outperforms its corresponding parallel Metropolis (non-rejection-free) counterpart. As an example application, we present results for metastable decay in a model ferromagnetic or ferroelectric film, observed with a probe of area smaller than the total system.