Plasma Simulation on Networks of Workstations using the Bulk-Synchronous Parallel Modely

Computationally intensive applications with frequent communication and synchronization require careful design for eecient execution on networks of workstations. We describe a Bulk-Synchronous Processing (BSP) model implementation of a plasma simulation and use of BSP analysis techniques for tuning the program for arbitrary architectures. In addition, we compare the performance of the BSP implementation with a version using MPI. Our results indicate that the BSP model, serving as a basis for an eecient implementation, compares favorably with MPI.