CONCURRENT PROCESSING IN COMPUTATIONAL CHEMISTRY

THIS PROGRAM INVESTIGATES THE USE OF A NEW MIMD COMPUTER SYSTEM, THE INTEL IPSC HYPERCUBE, FOR POTENTIAL USE AS A MO-LECULAR MODELINGSYSTEM. PHASE I WILL STUDY ALGORITHMS FOR EFFICIENTLY PROGRAMMING MOLECULAR DYNAMICS SIMULATION ON THIS SYSTEM WITH CONCURRENT REALTIME GRAPHICAL ANALYSIS. THE LATEST MEMBERS OF THE IPSC FAMILY OFFER POTENTIALLY SUPERCOMPUTER PERFORMANCE IN A SYSTEM PRICED IN THE RANGE OFPRESENT SUPERMINICOMPUTERS. HOWEVER, BECAUSE THEY UTILIZE ALARGE NUMBER OF MICROPROCESSORS (NODES) OPERATING IN PARAL- LEL WITH EACH PROCESSOR CAPABLE OF BEING TIGHTLY COUPLED TO A TWO-MFLOPS VECTOR PROCESSORS, AND UTILIZE PROCESSES COUPL-ING ARBITRARY NUMBERS OF NODES NOVEL ALGORITHMS ARE REQUIREDTO FULLY EXPLOIT THE ARCHITECTURE. THE MULTIPROCESS CONCUR-RENCY OF THE ARCHITECTURE WILL BE EXPLORED IN PHASE I TO DE-VELOP INNOVATIVE TECHNIQUES FOR PERFORMING GRAPHICAL ANALY- SIS OF A MOLECULAR SIMULATION DURING COMPUTATION. ANTICIPA-TED RESULTS OF PHASE I ARE NEW ALGORITHMS FOR PARALLEL SIMU-LATION AND GRAPHICAL ANALYSIS OF INTEREST TO A WIDE RANGE OFAREAS IN MOLECULAR SCIENCE. THE CONCLUSIONS WILL BE APPLICABLE TO OTHER COMPUTERS USING THIS ARCHITECTURE. BY EXTEND-ING THE TYPES OF METHODS STUDIED, THE POSSIBILITY EXISTS FORTHE DEVELOPMENT OF AN INTEGRATED RESEARCH TOOL OF CONSIDERA-BLE INTEREST TO THE CHEMICAL COMMUNITY.