In the previous assignment, you implemented a parallel n-body simulation using shared-memory parallelism with the support of the OpenMP library. In this assignment, you will again implement a parallel n-body simulation using an alternative parallel programming model—message passing. As you already know from the lectures, unlike shared- memory parallelism where threads communicate by reading and writing shared memory, in the message passing model the processes do not have access to shared memory, and they can communicate only by sending messages to each other.
In this assignment, we will use Message Passing Interface (MPI), a portable message passing standard that defines syntax and semantics of a set of routines for parallel programming. There are multiple high-performance implemen- tations of MPI, of which we will use Open MPI.