A&A 448, 731-737 (2006)
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361:20053120

Radiative transfer in decomposed domains

T. Heinemann^{1, 2}, W. Dobler^{3, 4}, Å. Nordlund² and A. Brandenburg<sup>1

1</sup>  NORDITA, Blegdamsvej 17, 2100 Copenhagen Ø, Denmark
    e-mail: theine@nordita.dk
²  Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen University, Juliane Maries Vej 30, 2100 Copenhagen Ø, Denmark
³  Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
⁴  Kiepenheuer-Institut für Sonnenphysik, Schöneckstraße 6, 79104 Freiburg, Germany

(Received 23 March 2005 / Accepted 7 November 2005 )

Abstract
Aims. An efficient algorithm for calculating radiative transfer on massively parallel computers using domain decomposition is presented.
Methods. The integral formulation of the transfer equation is used to divide the problem into a local but compute-intensive part for calculating the intensity and optical depth integrals, and a nonlocal part for communicating the intensity between adjacent processors.
Results. The waiting time of idle processors during the nonlocal communication part does not have a severe impact on the scaling. The wall clock time thus scales nearly linearly with the inverse number of processors.

Key words: radiative transfer -- methods: numerical -- hydrodynamics

© ESO 2006

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