Opendda: a Novel High-Performance Computational Framework for the Discrete Dipole Approximation

  • Authors:
  • James Mc Donald;Aaron Golden;S. Gerard Jennings

  • Affiliations:
  • COMPUTATIONAL ASTROPHYSICS LABORATORY, I.T. DEPARTMENT,NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, GALWAY;COMPUTATIONAL ASTROPHYSICS LABORATORY, I.T. DEPARTMENT,NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, GALWAY;SCHOOL OF PHYSICS AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE INSTITUTE,NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, GALWAY

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

This work presents a highly optimized computational frameworkfor the Discrete Dipole Approximation, a numerical method forcalculating the optical properties associated with a target ofarbitrary geometry that is widely used in atmospheric,astrophysical and industrial simulations. Core optimizationsinclude the bit-fielding of integer data and iterative methods thatcomplement a new Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) kernel, whichefficiently calculates the matrix-vector products required by theseiterative solution schemes. The new kernel performs the requisite3-D DFTs as ensembles of 1-D transforms, and by doing so, is ableto reduce the number of constituent 1-D transforms by 60% and thememory by over 80%. The optimizations also facilitate the use ofparallel techniques to further enhance the performance. CompleteOpenMP-based shared-memory and MPI-based distributed-memoryimplementations have been created to take full advantage of thevarious architectures. Several benchmarks of the new frameworkindicate extremely favorable performance and scalability.