Computational Structure of the N-body Problem

Abstract

This work considers the organization and performance of computations on parallel computers of tree algorithms for the N-body problem where the number of particles is on the order of a million. The N-body problem is formulated as a set of recursive equations based on a few elementary functions, which leads to a computational structure in the form of a pyramid-like graph, where each vertex is a process, and each arc a communication link. The pyramid is mapped to three different processor configurations: (1) A pyramid of processors corresponding to the processes pyramid graph; (2) A hypercube of processors, e.g., a connection-machine like architecture; (3) A rather small array, e.g., $2 \\times 2 \\ times 2$, of processors faster than the ones considered in (1) and (2) above. Simulations of this size can be performed on any of the three architectures in reasonable time.