Design metrics in quantum turbulence simulations: How physics influences software architecture

  • Authors:

  • Damian W. I. Rouson;Yi Xiong

  • Affiliations:

  • Mech. Eng. Dept., The City Coll. of The City Univ. of New York, Convent Ave. at 140th St., New York, NY 10031, USA. Tel.: +1 212 650 5210/ Fax: +1 815 572 8203/ rouson@ccny.cuny.edu (Correspd. US ...;Mech. Eng. Dept., The Grad. Ctr. of The City Univ. of New York, NY 10015, USA. E-mail: yxiongcuny@hotmail.com (Current address: Mech. Eng. Dept., Univ. of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, C ...

  • Venue:
  • Scientific Programming
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

The information hiding philosophy of object-oriented programming encourages localizing data structures within objects rather than sharing data globally across different classes of objects. This emphasis on local data leads naturally to fine-grained data abstractions, particularly in scientific simulations involving large collections of small, discrete physical or mathematical objects. This paper focuses on a subset of such simulations where dynamically reconfigurable links bind the objects together. It is demonstrated that fine-grained data structures reduce the complexity of local operations on the data at the potential expense of increased global operation complexity. Two metrics are used to describe data structures: granularity is the number of instantiations required to cover the data space, whereas extent is the continuously traversable length of the data along a given direction. These definitions are applied to two abstractions for simulating the turbulent motion of quantum vortices in superfluid liquid helium. Several local and global operations on a fine-grained linked list are compared with those on a coarse-grained array. It is demonstrated that fine-grained data structures recover the simplicity of more coarse-grained structures if maximal extent is maintained as the granularity increases.