Monte Carlo Simulations of Settlement Dynamics in GPUs

EMMANUEL MILLAN; SILVANA GOIRÁN; MARÍA FABIANA PICCOLI; CARLOS GARCÍA GARINO; JULIETA N. ARANIBAR; EDUARDO BRINGA

CLUSTER COMPUTING-THE JOURNAL OF NETWORKS SOFTWARE TOOLS AND APPLICATIONS

SPRINGER

Lugar: Berlin; Año: 2015 vol. 19 p. 557 - 566

1386-7857

Recently, a Monte Carlo model (MC) was proposed to simulate settlement dynamics in drylands, including several environmental factors, and it was implemented as a serial CPU code. In this work we present a parallel implementation of that code using Graphics Processing Units (GPU) and NVIDIA CUDA. The code was tested with two experiments, a Baseline case and a Realistic case. We take advantage of the GPU architecture to obtain significant speedups: ∼8 x to ∼20 x with the Baseline case in a NVIDIA Tesla C2050 versus a Phenom 1055T CPU. The Realistic case obtained ∼80 x of speedup in the same hardware. Because of the achieved performance more complex simulations can be executed, using larger lattice sizes and additional envronmental factors which will allow us to obtain more accurate results on future environmental degradation.