Parallel implementation of many-body mean-field equations

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
We describe the numerical methods used to solve the system of stiff, nonlinear partial differential equations resulting from the Hartree-Fock description of many-particle quantum systems, as applied to the structure of the nucleus. The solutions are performed on a three-dimensional Cartesian lattice. Discretization is achieved through the lattice basis-spline collocation method, in which quantum-state vectors and coordinate-space operators are expressed in terms of basis-spline functions on a spatial lattice. All numerical procedures reduce to a series of matrix-vector multiplications and other elementary operations, which we perform on a number of different computing architectures, including the Intel Paragon and the Intel iPSC/860 hypercube. Parallelization is achieved through a combination of mechanisms employing the Gram-Schmidt procedure, broadcasts, global operations, and domain decomposition of state vectors. We discuss the approach to the problems of limited node memory and node-to-node communication overhead inherent in using distributed-memory, multiple-instruction, multiple-data stream parallel computers. An algorithm was developed to reduce the communication overhead by pipelining some of the message passing procedures.