The objective of this Research Initiation project is to determine the most effective method of performing simulation studies on a multiprocessing system. Molecular Dynamics will be the specific class of problem chosen where simulation codes will be developed for both a INMOS Transputer, a message-passing parallel processing system, and a BBN+, a shared-memory parallel machine. The relative merits of the shared-memory and message-passing paradigms for this class of problems will be determined. An existing sequential Molecular Dynamics code will first be adapted to a parallel environment on each of the two machines; performance evaluation methods will identify the bottlenecks in system performance. The codes will be iterated, resulting in successively more efficient implementations.
