Case Study - Alice

Alice is working on an astrophysics project that explores how light (photons) are scattered in stellar atmospheres.
She is using Monte Carlo Simulation, which simulates the path of 10000s of individual photons based on randomised starting conditions and events.
As the path of each simulated independently from the other, this part of her work is embarrassingly parallel.
She uses MPI on Setonix to simulate one photon per CPU core.
As each of Alice’s simulations completes quickly, saving the result of each simulation would result in her work being Memory bound.
She solves this by saving her work in ‘chunks’ of multiple simulation results.