Parallel N-Body Simulation on a Large-Scale Homogeneous Distributed System

A processor pool is a homogeneous collection of processors that are used for computationally intensive tasks, such as parallel programs. Processor pools are far less expensive than multicomputers and more convenient to use than collections of idle workstations. This paper gives a case study in parallel programming on a processor pool with 80 SPARCS connected by an Ethernet, running the Amoeba distributed operating system. We use a realistic application (N-body simulation of water molecules) and show that a good performance can be obtained. We measured a speedup of 72 on 80 processors. 1 Introduction Networks of idle workstations are often used for running parallel applications. Many institutes have a distributed computing system consisting of many powerful workstations, which are idle most of the time. Using this (otherwise wasted) processing power for running coarse-grained parallel applications thus seems attractive. Unfortunately, this approach to parallel processing also has sever..