A Parallel Version of the Fast Multipole Method

Abstract

This paper presents a parallel version of the Fast Multipole Method (FMM). The FMM is a recently developed scheme for the evaluation of the potential and force fields in systems of particles whose interactions are Coulombic or gravitational in nature. The sequential method requires O(N) operations to obtain the fields due to N charges at N points, rather than the O(N Squared) operations required by the direct calculation. Here, we describe the modifications necessary for implementation of the method on parallel architectures and show that the expected time requirements grow as log N when using N processors. Numerical results are given for a shared memory machine (the Encore Multimax 320).

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 01, 1988
Accession Number
ADA199804

Entities

People

  • L. Greengard
  • W. D. Gropp

Organizations

  • Yale University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Computational Complexity
  • Computations
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Simulations
  • Computers
  • Efficiency
  • Equations
  • Errors
  • Far Field
  • Military Research
  • N Body Problem
  • Near Field
  • Particles
  • Precision
  • Simulations
  • Three Dimensional

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Finite Element Method (FEM) for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs)
  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.
  • Plasma Physics / Magnetohydrodynamics