# SKIRT: hybrid parallelization of radiative transfer simulations

## TL;DR

The paper presents a hybrid parallelization scheme for the SKIRT Monte Carlo radiative transfer code, combining MPI and shared memory threading to improve scalability and flexibility across diverse computing architectures.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel hybrid parallelization approach that enhances performance and simplifies implementation in astrophysical radiative transfer simulations.

## Key findings

- Improved scaling behavior of SKIRT code.
- Flexible adaptation to various hardware architectures.
- Enhanced performance in modeling dusty astrophysical systems.

## Abstract

We describe the design, implementation and performance of the new hybrid parallelization scheme in our Monte Carlo radiative transfer code SKIRT, which has been used extensively for modeling the continuum radiation of dusty astrophysical systems including late-type galaxies and dusty tori. The hybrid scheme combines distributed memory parallelization, using the standard Message Passing Interface (MPI) to communicate between processes, and shared memory parallelization, providing multiple execution threads within each process to avoid duplication of data structures. The synchronization between multiple threads is accomplished through atomic operations without high-level locking (also called lock-free programming). This improves the scaling behavior of the code and substantially simplifies the implementation of the hybrid scheme. The result is an extremely flexible solution that adjusts to the number of available nodes, processors and memory, and consequently performs well on a wide variety of computing architectures.