The linked cell list algorithm is an essential part of molecular simulation
software, both molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo. Though it scales linearly
with the number of particles, there has been a constant interest in increasing
its efficiency, because a large part of CPU time is spent to identify the
interacting particles. Several recent publications proposed improvements to the
algorithm and investigated their efficiency by applying them to particular
setups. In this publication we develop a general method to evaluate the
efficiency of these algorithms, which is mostly independent of the parameters
of the simulation, and test it for a number of linked cell list algorithms. We
also propose a combination of linked cell reordering and interaction sorting
that shows a good efficiency for a broad range of simulation setups.Comment: Submitted to Computer Physics Communications on 22 December 2009,
still awaiting a referee repor