## Theses and Dissertations

#### Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Novotny, Mark A.

#### Committee Member

Afanasjevs, Anatolijs

Luke, Edward

Clay, R. Torsten

#### Committee Member

Oppenheimer, Seth

12-15-2007

#### Document Type

Dissertation - Open Access

Applied Physics

#### Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

#### College

James Worth Bagley College of Engineering

#### Department

Applied Physics Program

#### Abstract

Non-equilibrium surface growth for competitive growth models in (1+1) dimensions, particularly mixing random deposition (RD) with correlated growth process which occur with probability $p$ are studied. The composite mixtures are found to be in the universality class of the correlated growth process, and a nonuniversal exponent $\delta$ is identified in the scaling in $p$. The only effects of the RD admixture are dilations of the time and height scales which result in a slowdown of the dynamics of building up the correlations. The bulk morphology is taken into account and is reflected in the surface roughening, as well as the scaling behavior. It is found that the continuum equations and scaling laws for RD added, in particular, to Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) processes are partly determined from the underlying bulk structures. Nonequilibrium surface growth analysis are also applied to a study of the static and dynamic load balancing for a conservative update algorithm for Parallel Discrete Event Simulations (PDES). This load balancing is governed by the KPZ equation. For uneven load distributions in conservative PDES simulations, the simulated (virtual) time horizon (VTH) per Processing Element (PE) and the imulated time horizon per volume element $N_{v}$ are used to study the PEs progress in terms of utilization. The width of these time horizons relates to the desynchronization of the system of processors, and is related to the memory requirements of the PEs. The utilization increases when the dynamic, rather than static, load balancing is performed.

#### URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11668/17252