Design and Application of Object Oriented Parallel Data Structures in Particle and Continuous Systems

The complexity of parallel computing hardware calls for software that eases the development of numerical models for researchers that do not have a deep knowledge of the platforms’ communication strategies and that do not have the time to write efficient code themselves. We show in three examples how two “container” data structures, one for particles, the other an array for arbitrary data types, can address the needs of many potential users of parallel machines that have so far been deterred by the complexity of parallelizing code. These examples comprise (i) parallel solutions of partial differential equations, (ii) a molecular dynamics simulation of more than 109 particles and (iii) a simulation of particles sedimenting in a viscous fluid.