Microscopic nuclear structure on a parallel platform Original Research Article

Numerical techniques, used to solve a system of stiff nonlinear partial differential equations in a Hartree-Fock mean field description of the structure of the nucleus, are described in detail. A full three-dimensional discrete representation is obtained using a collocation basis-spline spatial lattice, which provides a superior method as compared to traditional approaches. The set of Hartree-Fock equations reduce, in this case, to various matrix vector multiplications and other elementary operations. Parallelization is achieved by mapping the state vectors onto the nodes, using the Intel Paragon and iPSC/860. Procedures used to perform global operations and broadcasts, and a discussion on increasing the vectorization efficiency are presented. Special attention is given to reduce the communication overhead. An algorithm to pipeline the message passing procedures within the Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization routine is discussed in detail.