Multitasking case study on the Cray-2: the Q2R cellular automaton

Abstract The Q2R cellular automaton which may be used for microcanonical simulation of the Ising model is implemented in parallel on the four processors of a Cray-2 supercomputer. The simulation speed is 4.3 GHz as opposed to 670 MHz for the previously fastest reported implementation using one processor of a Cray-XMP. We also simulated the largest Ising system ever studied, 15, 130, 968, 192 spins. A number of subtleties in implementing and optimizing the parallel algorithm are discussed, as well as problems in defining performance measurements. Performance and results from the Q2R algorithm are compared to those from the standard Metropolis algorithm, and a number of dynamic exponents are measured for the first time.

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