Identifying Strongly Connected Components in Parallel

W. McLendon III, B. Hendrickson, S. J. Plimpton, L. Rauchwerger, in Proc of SIAM Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing Conf, March 2001.

Discrete ordinates methods are commonly used to simulate radiation transport for fire or weapons modeling. The computation proceeds by sweeping the flux across a grid. A particular cell can't be computed until all the cells immediately upwind of it are finished. If the directed dependence graph for the grid cells contains a cycle then sweeping methods will deadlock. This can happen in unstructured grids and time stepped problems where the grid is allowed to deform. In this paper we present a parallel algorithm to detect cycles in the dependence graphs present in these grids as well as an implementation and experimental results on shared and distributed memory machines.

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