Forum 06/12/2003

“Parallelizing SPIDER using MPI”

Chao Yang – Computer Scientist, LBL

The Message Passing Interface (MPI) has become a standard tool for enabling scientific application codes to run efficiently on distributed-memory parallel machines such as Linux clusters.  Preliminary work has been done on utilizing MPI to parallelize one of the widely used single-particle reconstruction software package — SPIDER.  In this talk, we will examine some basic strategies for implementing the MPI-enabled SPIDER alignment and reconstruction operations.  Preliminary performance results obtained on a Linux cluster maintained at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab will also be presented.