English

Efficiency of linked cell algorithms

Computational Physics 2013-03-19 v1 Materials Science Soft Condensed Matter

Abstract

The linked cell list algorithm is an essential part of molecular simulation software, both molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo. Though it scales linearly with the number of particles, there has been a constant interest in increasing its efficiency, because a large part of CPU time is spent to identify the interacting particles. Several recent publications proposed improvements to the algorithm and investigated their efficiency by applying them to particular setups. In this publication we develop a general method to evaluate the efficiency of these algorithms, which is mostly independent of the parameters of the simulation, and test it for a number of linked cell list algorithms. We also propose a combination of linked cell reordering and interaction sorting that shows a good efficiency for a broad range of simulation setups.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1006.1239,
  title  = {Efficiency of linked cell algorithms},
  author = {Ulrich Welling and Guido Germano},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1006.1239},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

Submitted to Computer Physics Communications on 22 December 2009, still awaiting a referee report

R2 v1 2026-06-21T15:32:46.685Z