Workshop on performing direct N-body calculations on massive parallel distributed memory platforms with special purpose hardware
It is our pleasure to invite you to take part in the MODEST (MOdeling DEnse STellar systems) satellite workshop on the construction of realistic simulation models for star clusters. There have been four larger MODEST meeting so far, which were held in New York City (USA), Amsterdam (the Netherlands), Melbourne (Australia) and Geneva (Switzerland). This will be the first of the smaller more specialized satellite MODEST meetings which, for this reason, we call MODEST-4b. This meeting will be held in June 7-8 at the Astronomical Institute 'Anton Pannekoek' and the Section Computational Science of the University of Amsterdam in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Our main aim is to bring together a number of experts from the fields of stellar dynamics and computational science, though we welcome the usual MODEST collaborators to attend this workshop.
The main objectives of this satellite meeting is to discuss efficient parallel algorithms for performing direct N-body simulations on GRAPE-supported distributed and Beowulf platforms.
The main reason for such a specialized meeting is the recent rather widespread availability if GRAPE systems on interconnected PC's or Beowulf systems. This recent development requires the parallelization of direct N-body algorithms, which is quite a challenge.
While this meeting is probably not particularly interesting for all MODEST astronomers, we do not want to exclude anybody from our collaborative effort, which is the core of the MODEST philosophy. We therefore assembled a rather small list of potential participants of whom we know are interested, and we contacted them separately at an earlier stage. If you have not received an invitation, and you are particularly interested to attend this meeting, feel free to send a reminder to Simon Portegies Zwart and he will send you an invitation shortly. Note however, that we try to keep the number of participants small, ideally below a dozen.
We plan to make this a real `working' workshop, somewhat in the style of the Aspen conferences, with few talks, much discussion about hands-on aspects of developing an efficient parallel algorithm for solving the direct N-body problem with GRAPE. We will not schedule any talks, and as a consequence there will be no designated `invited speakers'. Instead, we simply encourage all of you to bring some relevant presentations. The real input of the meeting will be your collective expertise in parallelizing N-body kernels and the use of GRAPE or other computer hardware. For the output, we envision some budding collaborations leading to the development of an efficient direct N-body algorithm for parallel platform.
In keeping with the spirit of an informal work-workshop, there will be no registration fee, nor will we have any means to offer financial assistance to the participants. Instead of a banquet, we will sample the numerous fine restaurants/bars at walking distance to your hotel. We do plan to have a welcoming reception in the evening of Sunday June 6, at cafe East of Eden at Linnaeusstraat 11, Amsterdam.
More information can be found at: http://www.manybody.org/modest-4b.html
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We hope to see you all at the East of Eden on Sunday 6 June 2004.
Simon Portegies Zwart
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Rainer Spurzem