Having done quite a bit of HPC in my research career, the usually best approach is (IMO) to: * decompose the problem data to the subsets handled by each machin

Having done quite a bit of HPC in my research career, the usually best approach is (IMO) to: * decompose the problem data to the subsets handled by each machine * within each node, use pushing. this allows walking the node-internal data structure sequentially, thus is very cache friendly * for the boundary cells, use pulling edit: I should add, it may also make sense to do pulling between the cores, otherwise you need locks which could hurt performance as well.