The development and integration of a distributed 3D FFT for a cluster of workstations
In this paper, the authors discuss the steps taken in the formulation of a parallel 3D FFT with good scalability on a cluster of fast workstations connected via commo dity 100 Mb/s ethernet. The motivation for this work is to improve the p erformance and scalability of the Distributed Particle Mesh Ewald (DPME) N-b o dy solver. Scalability issues in the FFT and DPME as an application are presented separately. Also discussed are scalability issues related to the networking hardware used in the cluster. Results indicate that the existence of a parallel FFT signi cantly improves p erformance in DPME from a maximum of 5 pro cessors to at least 24 processors on a cluster of workstations. This has an asso ciated increase in speedup from 4 to 12 times faster than the serial version.
