Highly Portable and Efficient Implementations of Parallel Adaptive N-Body Methods

We describe the design of several portable and efficient parallel implementations of adaptive N-body methods, including the adaptive Fast Multipole Method, the adaptive version of Anderson's Method, and the Barnes-Hut algorithm. Our codes are based on a communication and work partitioning scheme that allows an efficient implementation of adaptive multipole methods even on high-latency systems. Our test runs demonstrate high performance and speedup on several parallel architectures, including traditional MPPs, shared-memory machines, and networks of workstations connected by Ethernet. 1 Introduction The N-body problem is the problem of simulating the movement of a set of bodies (or particles) under the influence of gravitational, electrostatic, or other type of force. Algorithms for N-body simulations have a number of important applications in fields such as astrophysics, molecular dynamics, fluid dynamics, and even computer graphics [12]. A large number of algorithms for N-body simula..