ITR: Collaborative Research in Novel Dynamic Scheduling Methods with Application to Computation of Quantum Trajectories

Mississippi State University, Mississippi State MS

Investigators

Abstract

This project will discover novel scheduling techniques for large scale applications on parallel computers, and will develop new parallel algorithms using those scheduling techniques to calculate quantum trajectories for electron scattering problems. Such research is important to help enable theoretical models as close as possible to real events, so that simulations of physical phenomenal derive accurate predictions. Since many application problems in science and engineering are irregular, large and computationally intensive, finding their best solution in terms of numerical properties and parallel performance represents an important contribution to the development of advanced computational science. Technically, this project will develop new models for dynamic scheduling strategies used in scientific computing based on probabalistic and statistical analysis, and will evaluate their effectiveness on an analytical and experimental basis. The project specifcally addresses the following general issues: (1) to develop novel dynamic scheduling strategies that can accommodate applications with unpredictable behavior in load distribution, and evaluate their competitiveness with respect to existing technology; (2) to develop new parallel numerical algorithms using those strategies for the study of scattering from an Eckart potential barrier in one dimension and electron scattering in three dimensions from the ground state hydrogen atom and one, two, three and four electrons bound to a hydrogen-like one and two dimensional multicharged ion; (3) to analyze the performance of this parallel application via new and predictive performance metrics. In addition, visualization methods will be applied to the calculation of quantum trajectories, leading to the possible identification of visual and quantified signatures of "quantum chaos." This is chaos in quantum mechanical systems defined in terms of the behavior of quantum trajectories.