Parallelising the LMTO band-structure program on transputer arrays

✍ Scribed by W. Yeung

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1991
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 688 KB
• Volume: 66
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0010-4655
• DOI: 10.1016/0010-4655(91)90006-7

✦ Synopsis

We describe our experiences at parallelising a large Fortran program on a distributed-memory parallel computer. The program is the first-principles linear muffin tin orbital (LMTO) band-structure program which is used widely to calculate the electronic properties of crystalline solids, multilayers. polymers and complex molecules. The parallelising was done with (1) 3L parallel Fortran running on a quadputer, (2) Meiko's Occam Programming System (OPS) and (3) CS Tools on the Meiko Surface. We found that farming was not practicable because of livelock, the most efficient system was OPS, and that the speed of the program exceeds that of the CRAY when it is run on the larger domains of the Edinburgh Supercomputer. Also large numbers of k points can be easily handled on these domains. We give and discuss the efficiency of speed-up from our parallelisation.