Billiards and related systems on the bulk-synchronous parallel model

Abstract

With two examples we show the suitability of the bulk-synchronous parallel (BSP) model for discrete-event simulation of homogeneous large-scale systems. This model provides a unifying approach for general purpose parallel computing which in addition to efficient and scalable computation, ensures portability across different parallel architectures. A valuable feature of this approach is a simple cost model that enables precise performance prediction of BSP algorithms. We show both theoretically and empirically that systems with uniform event occurrence among their components, such as colliding hard-spheres and ising-spin models, can be efficiently simulated in practice on current parallel computers supporting the BSP model.