Parallelization of Cellular Automata for Surface Reactions

Abstract

We present a parallel implementation of cellular automata to simulate chemical reactions on surfaces. The scaling of the computer time with the number of processors for this parallel implementation is quite close to the ideal T/P, where T is the computer time used for one single processor and P the number of processors. Two examples are presented to test the algorithm, the simple A+B->0 model and a realistic model for CO oxidation on Pt(110). By using large parallel simulations, it is possible to derive scaling laws which allow us to extrapolate to even larger system sizes and faster diffusion coefficients allowing us to make direct comparisons with experiments.