Parallel execution and scriptability in micromagnetic simulations

Abstract

We demonstrate the feasibility of an ‘encapsulated parallelism’ approach towards micromagnetic simulations that combines offering a high degree of flexibility to the user with the efficient utilization of parallel computing resources.
While parallelization is obviously desirable to address the high numerical effort required for realistic micromagnetic simulations through utilizing now widely available multiprocessor systems (including desktop multicore CPUs and computing clusters), conventional approaches towards parallelization impose strong restrictions on the structure of programs: numerical operations have to be executed across all processors in a synchronized fashion. This means that, from the user’s perspective, either the structure of the entire simulation is rigidly defined from the beginning and cannot be adjusted easily, or making modifications to the computation sequence requires advanced knowledge in parallel programming.
We explain how this dilemma is resolved in the Nmag simulation package in such a way that the user can utilize without any additional effort on his side both the computational power of multiple CPUs and the flexibility to tailor execution sequences for specific problems: simulation scripts written for single processor machines can just as well be executed on parallel machines and behave in precisely the same way, up to increased speed. We provide a simple instructive magnetic resonance simulation example that demonstrates utilizing both custom execution sequences and parallelism at the same time. Furthermore, we show that this strategy of encapsulating parallelism even allows to benefit from speed gains through parallel execution in simulations controlled by interactive commands given at a command line interface.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Hans Fangohr: orcid.org/0000-0001-5494-7193

Catalogue record

Export record

Altmetrics