El. Pollock et J. Glosli, COMMENTS ON P(3)M, FMM, AND THE EWALD METHOD FOR LARGE PERIODIC COULOMBIC SYSTEMS, Computer physics communications, 95(2-3), 1996, pp. 93-110
Prompted by the need to simulate large molecular or gravitational syst
ems and the availability of multiprocessor computers, alternatives to
the standard Ewald calculation of Coulombic interactions have been dev
eloped. The two most popular alternatives, the fast multipole method (
FMM) and the particle-particle particle-mesh (P(3)M) method are compar
ed here to the Ewald method for a single processor machine. Parallel p
rocessor implementations of the P(3)M and Ewald methods are compared.
The P(3)M method is found to be both faster than the FMM and easier to
implement efficiently as it relies on commonly available software (FF
T subroutines). Both the Ewald and P(3)M method are easily implemented
on parallel architectures with the P(3)M method the clear choice for
large systems.