N-Body program, a parallel version

• N-body Particle System and BSP N-body Particle System from Andrew G. Zaferakis, Kenneth Hoff, Chris Weigle UNC Chapel Hill
• Partitioning and Divide and Conquer Strategies (see N-body section, slides 4.25 - 4.28), these slides are from Rutgers U. Introduction to Parallel and Distributed Programming (originals are here)
• Parallel Computing to Solve the N-Body Problem (from Berkeley)
• N-body Simulations

See gravityMPI.cpp from BSP N-body Particle System, MPI Parallel Processing. This is an MPI parallel version of the N-body simulation.

An array of particle objects is used with:

1. x,y position
2. mass
3. velocity components in the x and in the y directions

Assignment

1. Explain in written form how this parallel algorithm in gravityMPI.cpp is working. For example, use 6 particles and 4 processors and trace through a particular scenario. For help, here's an example 6 particle version - gravityMPIShell6Particles.c

2. Run this MPI program on the Cray SV1 and record the data of the movements of a number of particles. Graph with Gnuplot or Openoffice Excel the results of a number of time steps the x,y movements of your test particles. Compare these movements based on non-parallel vs parallel versions of the program.

3. (Unfinished - I'll have more experiments later for you to try)