<title>Parallel Monte Carlo simulation of multilattice thin film growth</title>

Abstract

This paper describe a new parallel algorithm for the multi-lattice Monte Carlo atomistic simulator for thin film deposition (ADEPT), implemented on parallel computer using the PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) message passing library. This parallel algorithm is based on domain decomposition with overlapping and asynchronous communication. Multiple lattices are represented by a single reference lattice through one-to-one mappings, with resulting computational demands being comparable to those in the single-lattice Monte Carlo model. Asynchronous communication and domain overlapping techniques are used to reduce the waiting time and communication time among parallel processors. Results show that the algorithm is highly efficient with large number of processors. The algorithm was implemented on a parallel machine with 50 processors, and it is suitable for parallel Monte Carlo simulation of thin film growth with either a distributed memory parallel computer or a shared memory machine with message passing libraries. In this paper, the significant communication time in parallel MC simulation of thin film growth is effectively reduced by adopting domain decomposition with overlapping between sub-domains and asynchronous communication among processors. The overhead of communication does not increase evidently and speedup shows an ascending tendency when the number of processor increases. A near linear increase in computing speed was achieved with number of processors increases and there is no theoretical limit on the number of processors to be used. The techniques developed in this work are also suitable for the implementation of the Monte Carlo code on other parallel systems.