DHPC Talk DHPCT-024

Techniques for Empirical Testing of Parallel Random Number Generators

Paul Coddington

Archived: 25 February 1999

Presented at the ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS'98), Melbourne, July 1998.
See also the accompanying technical paper.

Abstract

Parallel computers are now commonly used for computational science and engineering, and many applications in these areas use random number generators. For some applications, such as large-scale Monte Carlo simulations, it is crucial that the random number generator have good randomness properties. Many programs are available for testing the quality of sequential random number generators, but very little work has been done on testing parallel random number generators. We present some techniques for empirical testing of random number generators on parallel computers, using tests based on computational science applications as examples. In particular, we focus on tests based on parallel algorithms developed for Monte Carlo simulations of the two dimensional Ising model, for which exact results are known. Preliminary results of these tests are presented for several parallel random number generators.

PDF version of the slides

PostScript version of the slides


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