Title
High Performance Gravitational N-body Simulations on a Planet-wide Distributed Supercomputer
Abstract
We report on the performance of our cold-dark matter cosmological N-body simulation which was carried out concurrently using supercomputers across the globe. We ran simulations on 60 to 750 cores distributed over a variety of supercomputers in Amsterdam (the Netherlands, Europe), in Tokyo (Japan, Asia), Edinburgh (UK, Europe) and Espoo (Finland, Europe). Regardless the network latency of 0.32 seconds and the communication over 30.000 km of optical network cable we are able to achieve about 87% of the performance compared to an equal number of cores on a single supercomputer. We argue that using widely distributed supercomputers in order to acquire more compute power is technically feasible, and that the largest obstacle is introduced by local scheduling and reservation policies.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1088/1749-4699/4/1/015001
Computational Science & Discovery
Keywords
Field
DocType
cold dark matter
Reservation,Obstacle,Supercomputer,Computer science,Scheduling (computing),Simulation,Parallel computing,Theoretical computer science,Planet,Cold dark matter,Gravitation,Networking cables
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
abs/1101.0
1
Comput. Sci. Disc. 4 (2011) 015001
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
6
0.51
13
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Derek Groen113320.48
Simon Portegies Zwart219223.58
Tomoaki Ishiyama3252.34
Junichiro Makino414734.17