Plasma turbulence calculations on the intel iPSC/860 (RX) hypercube

Abstract One approach to improving the real-time efficiency of plasma turbulence calculations is to use a parallel algorithm. A serial algorithm used for plasma turbulence calculations is modified to allocate a radial region in each node. In this way, convolutions at a fixed radius are performed in parallel, and communication is limited to boundary values for each radial region. For a semi-implicit numerical scheme (tridiagonal matrix solver), there is a factor of 2 improvement in efficiency with the Intel iPSC/860 machine using 64 processors over a single-processor CRAY-II. For block-tridiagonal matrix cases (fully implicit code), a second parallelization takes place. The Fourier components are distributed in nodes. In each node, the block-tridiagonal matrix is inverted for each of the allocated Fourier components. The algorithm for this second case has similar efficiency in both machines.