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Section: Software and Platforms

ScalFMM

Participant : Olivier Coulaud [corresponding member] .

ScalFMM (Parallel Fast Multipole Library for Large Scale Simulations) is a software library to simulate N-body interactions using the Fast Multipole Method.

ScalFMM intends to offer all the functionalities needed to perform large parallel simulations while enabling an easy customization of the simulation components: kernels, particles and cells. It works in parallel in a shared/distributed memory model using OpenMP and MPI. The software architecture has been designed with two major objectives: being easy to maintain and easy to understand. There is two main parts: 1) the management of the octree and the parallelization of the method ; 2) the kernels. This new architecture allow us to easily add new FMM algorithm or kernels and new paradigm of parallelization. The code is extremely documented and the naming convention fully respected. Driven by its user-oriented philosophy, ScalFMM is using CMAKE as a compiler/installer tool. Even if ScalFMM is written in C++ it will support a C and fortran API soon.

The library offers two methods to compute interactions between bodies when the potential decays like $1/r$. The first method is the classical FMM based on spherical harmonic expansions and the second is the Black-Box method which is an independent kernel formulation (introduced by E. Darve at Stanford). With this method, we can now easily add new non oscillatory kernels in our library. For the classical method, two approaches are used to decrease the complexity of the operators. We consider either matrix formulation that allows us to use BLAS routines or rotation matrix to speed up the M2L operator.

The ScalFMM package is available at http://scalfmm.gforge.inria.fr