A parallel version of the fast multipole method

AbstractThis 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, rather than the O(N2) 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)