MPI_XSTAR: MPI-based Parallelization of the XSTAR Photoionization Program

TL;DR

MPI_XSTAR is a parallel implementation of the XSTAR photoionization code using MPI, significantly accelerating computations but with decreasing efficiency at higher processor counts.

Contribution

This work introduces MPI_XSTAR, a parallel version of XSTAR, enabling faster simulations of ionized gas properties through MPI-based parallelization.

Findings

Parallel execution is significantly faster than serial execution.

Efficiency decreases as the number of processors increases.

Benchmark results demonstrate speedup over serial runs.

Abstract

We describe a program for the parallel implementation of multiple runs of XSTAR, a photoionization code that is used to predict the physical properties of an ionized gas from its emission and/or absorption lines. The parallelization program, called MPI_XSTAR, has been developed and implemented in the C++ language by using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) protocol, a conventional standard of parallel computing. We have benchmarked parallel multiprocessing executions of XSTAR, using MPI_XSTAR, against a serial execution of XSTAR, in terms of the parallelization speedup and the computing resource efficiency. Our experience indicates that the parallel execution runs significantly faster than the serial execution, however, the efficiency in terms of the computing resource usage decreases with increasing the number of processors used in the parallel computing.