Plasma Physics Calculations on a Parallel Macintosh Cluster

Abstract

We have constructed a parallel cluster consisting of 16 Apple Macintosh G3 computers running the MacOS, and achieved very good performance on numerically intensive, parallel plasma particle-in-cell simulations. A subset of the MPI message-passing library was implemented in Fortran77 and C. This library enabled us to port code, without modification, from other parallel processors to the Macintosh cluster. For large problems where message packets are large and relatively few in number, performance of 50-150 MFlops/node is possible, depending on the problem. This is fast enough that 3D calculations can be routinely done. Unlike Unix-based clusters, no special expertise in operating systems is required to build and run the cluster.