Parallelization of the two-dimensional Ising model on a cluster of IBM RISC system/6000 workstations

Using the PVM programming environment for parallel applications, we have parallelized a simulation of the two-dimensional Ising Model on a cluster of IBM RISC System/6000 workstations connected by a Token Ring (16Mb/sec) and by Serial Optical Channels (220 Mb/sec) via a NSC DX Router. The parallelization is done by dividing the lattice into sublattices, each sublattice being associated with one workstation. On each sublattice, a Metropolis algorithm using Multispin Coding techniques is used to generate new configurations. We provide numerical results concerning the number of spin updates per second, speedups, and efficiencies for various numbers of processors and lattice sizes.