Application of massively parallel machines to molecular dynamics simulation of free clusters

Molecular dynamics is used to examine the melting of a free cluster of up to 1000 sodium and fluoride ions. An algorithm designed originally for the distributed array processor (DAP) is implemented on the Connection Machine (CM), and their performance for this problem is compared with that of the Cray 1. The CM would be twice as fast as the DAP using twice the number of processors as the DAP's 4096 were it not for saturation of the VAX front end. Saturation of the front end is shown to increase the run time by 50% in typical cases.<
>