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12.4.2 Computing Forces

Once the distribution of matter is represented on a number of length scales, it is possible to use the approximation in Equation 12.5 to reduce the number of operations required to find the force on a body. The force on each body is computed independently by a recursive procedure that traverses the tree from the top down. Beginning at the root of the tree, we simply apply a multipole acceptability criterion (MAC). This tells us whether Equation 12.5 (or an appropriate higher-order approximation) is sufficiently accurate. If it is, then we evaluate the approximation, and eliminate the summation over all the bodies contained within the node. Otherwise, we proceed recursively to the eight daughter cells of the node. Whenever we reach a terminal node, we simply compute the body-body interaction. The procedure is shown schematically in Figure 12.12.

  
Figure 12.12: The Barnes-Hut Algorithm

The performance of the algorithm depends on how we evaluate the MAC. For example, one could always answer ``no,'' in which case the performance would be identical to the case (although the bookkeeping overhead would be somewhat higher, and we would not take advantage of Newton's second law). The specifics of how best to evaluate the MAC would take us far afield [Barnes:89d], [Makino:90a], and [Salmon:92a].

Suffice it to say that all methods are based on the idea that the multipole approximation is accurate when the distance to the cell is large compared to the size of the cell. Essentially any criterion based on a ratio of size-of-cell to distance-to-cell will require -force evaluations to compute the total force on each body [Barnes:86a], [Salmon:90a]. Since the forces on all bodies are evaluated independently, the total number of evaluations is proportional to , which is a substantial improvement over the situation that results from a naive evaluation of Equation 12.3.



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Guy Robinson
Wed Mar 1 10:19:35 EST 1995