80.00.00 INTERDISCIPLINARY PHYSICS AND RELATED AREAS OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- ZIB-Report (10)
- Doctoral Thesis (2)
- Master's Thesis (1)
Language
- English (13) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (13)
Keywords
Simulations of the critical Ising model by means of local update algorithms suffer from critical slowing down. One way to partially compensate for the influence of this phenomenon on the runtime of simulations is using increasingly faster and parallel computer hardware. Another approach is using algorithms that do not suffer
from critical slowing down, such as cluster algorithms. This paper reports on the Swendsen-Wang multi-cluster algorithm on Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor 5110P, Nvidia Tesla M2090 GPU, and x86
multi-core CPU. We present shared memory versions of the said algorithm for the simulation of the two- and three-dimensional Ising model. We use a combination of local cluster search and global label reduction by means of atomic hardware primitives. Further, we
describe an MPI version of the algorithm on Xeon Phi and CPU, respectively. Significant performance improvements over known im
plementations of the Swendsen-Wang algorithm are demonstrated.
This thesis reports on simulating spin models on Nvidia graphics cards using the CUDA programming model; a particular approach for making GPGPU (General Purpose Computation on Graphics Processing Units) available for a wide range of software developers not necessarily acquainted with (massively) parallel programming. By comparing program execution times for simulations of the Ising model and the Ising spin glass by means of the Metropolis algorithm on Nvidia Tesla C1060 graphics cards and an Intel Core i7-920 quad-core x86 CPU (we used OpenMP to make our simulations run on all 4 execution units of the CPU), we noticed that the Tesla C1060 performed about a factor 5-10 faster than the Core i7-920, depending on the particular model and the accuracy of the calculations (32-bit or 64-bit). We also investigated the reliability of GPGPU computations, especially with respect to the occurrence of soft-errors as suggested in [23]. We noticed faulty program outputs during long-time simulations of the Ising model on ''large'' lattices. We were able to link these problems to overheating of the corresponding graphics cards. Doing Monte Carlo simulations on parallel computer architectures, as was the case in this thesis, suggests to also generate random numbers in a parallel manner. We present implementations of the random number generators Ranlux and Mersenne Twister. In addition, we give an alternative and very efficient approach for producing parallel random numbers on Nvidia graphics cards. We successfully tested all random number generators used in this thesis for their quality by comparing Monte Carlo estimates against exact calculations.
We present a level of detail method for trees based on ellipsoids and lines. We leverage the Expectation Maximization algorithm with a Gaussian Mixture Model to create a hierarchy of high-quality leaf clusterings, while the branches are simplified using agglomerative bottom-up clustering to preserve the connectivity. The simplification runs in a preprocessing step and requires no human interaction. For a fly by over and through a scene of 10k trees, our method renders on average at 40 ms/frame, up to 6 times faster than billboard clouds with comparable artifacts.