A New Shared-Memory Programming Paradigm for Molecular Dynamics Simulations on the Intel Paragon

This report describes the use of shared memory emulation with DOLIB (Distributed Object Library) to simplify parallel programming on the Intel Paragon. A molecular dynamics application is used as an example to illustrate the use of the DOLIB shared memory library. SOTON PAR, a parallel molecular dynamics code with explicit message-passing using a Lennard-Jones 6-12 potential, is rewritten using DOLIB primitives. The resulting code has no explicit message primitives and resembles a serial code. The new code can perform dynamic load balancing and achieves better performance than the original parallel code with explicit message-passing.