Related question: This one
I am using a spatial grid which can potentially get big (10^6 nodes) or even bigger. I will regularly have to perform displacement operations (like a particle from a node to another). I'm not a crack in informatics but I begin to understand the concepts of cache lines and spatial locality, though not well yet. So, I was wandering if it is preferible to use a 2D array (and if yes, which one? I'd prefer to avoid boost for now, but maybe I will link it later) and indexing the displacement for example like this:
Array[i][j] -> Array[i-1][j+2]
or, with a 1D array, if NX is the "equivalent" number of columns:
Array[i*NX+j] -> Array[(i-1)*NX+j+2]
Knowing that it will be done nearly one million times per iteration, with nearly one million iteration as well.
With modern compilers and optimization enabled both of these will probably generate the exact same code
Array[i-1][j+2] // Where Array is 2-dimensional
and
Array[(i-1)*NX+j+2] // Where Array is 1-dimensional
assuming NX is the dimension of the second subscript in the 2-dimensional Array (the number of columns).