Communication Reduction in Iterative Grid-based Computing Using SuperBoundary Exchange Technique

Iterative grid-based applications, typified by the finite di f- ference method for solving partial differential equations (1) and spatially oriented individual-based simulations (2), are important applications for distributed computing. How- ever, iterative grid-based distributed computations requ ire that communication be performed at every step, which can lead to significant communication overhead. We show how a technique called SuperBoundary Exchange (SBX) for significantly reducing this overhead in finite-differen ce computations, first introduced in (3), can be applied to individual-based computations as well, at a cost of a some- what coarser grid than might otherwise be necessary.