Parallel implementation of a cellular automata in a hybrid CPU/GPU environment

EMMANUEL N. MILLÁN; PAULA CECILIA MARTINEZ; VERÓNICA GIL COSTA; MARÍA FABIANA PICCOLI; MARCELA PRINTISTA; CARLOS S. BEDERIÁN; CARLOS GARCÍA GARINO; EDUARDO M. BRINGA

Mar del Plata

Workshop; XIII Workshop Procesamiento Distribuido y Paralelo; 2013

Universidad CAECE

Cellular Automata (CA) simulations can be used to model multiple systems, in fields like biology, physics and mathematics. In this work, a possible framework to execute a popular CA in hybrid CPU and GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) environments is presented. The inherently parallel nature of CA and the parallelism offered by GPUs makes their combination attractive. Benchmarks are conducted in sev- eral hardware scenarios. The use of MPI /OMP is explored for CPUs, together with the use of MPI in GPU clusters. Speed-ups up to 20 x are found when comparing GPU implementations to the serial CPU version of the code.