But no longer. Ceperley and former postdoct Ashok Srinivasan, now at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, India, and Michael Mascagni, director of the Program of Scientific Computing at the University of Southern Mississippi, have developed a library of parallel random number generators that is accessible via the Web. With this library, they can take advantage of the highest quality random number generators available. At the time, RNGs were not only difficult to find but also many were not performing up to the standards necessary with more powerful computers. The software includes a test suite to verify the quality of the random number streams.
Users can switch among generators in the library with a single change on the load line .
Usually when researchers convert a serial code into a parallel one, the same random number generator is repeated across all the processors. The result is the same as if they had run the job on a single processor. Mascagni is lead investigator. All rights reserved. Do not copy or redistribute in any form.