Efficient parallel simulations of dynamic Ising spin systems

Abstract An event-driven method for parallel simulation of a class dynamic Monte Carlo models is presented. The method can be applied to several models studied in the computational physics such as Ising spin simulations by the method of Metropolis, Rosenbluth, Rosenbluth, Teller, and Teller, continuous time Ising spin simulation by Glauber, and the dynamic binary alloy simulation. Unlike previously known parallel multi-spin algorithms, the proposed algorithms do not change the simulated model. For example, the asynchrony and randomness of update time arrivals which are present in Glauber's formulation, are not disturbed here and the simulated update history is precisely the same as it is in the serial algorithm. The theoretical efficiency evaluation is encouraging: for 768 × 768 spins using a parallel processor with 256 processing elements, the estimated efficiency is not lower than 71%. This means a parallel speed-up of 180 in the computations which were previously believed inherently serial. The algorithm by Bortz, Kalos, and Lebowitz can be incorporated, further contributing to speed-up.