Towards a high performance cellular automata programming skeleton

Abstract

Cellular automata provide an abstract model of parallel computation that can be effectively used for modeling and simulation of complex phenomena and systems. In this paper, we start from a skeleton designed to facilitate faster D-dimensional cellular automata application development. The key for the use of the skeleton is to achieve an efficient implementation, irrespective of the application specific details. In the parallel implementation on a cluster was important to consider issues such as task and data decomposition. With multicore clusters, new problems have emerged. The increasing numbers of cores per node, caches and shared memory inside the nodes, has led to the formation of a new hierarchy of access to processors. In this paper, we described some optimizations to restructuring the prototype code and exposing an abstracted view of the multicore cluster to the high performance CA application developer. The implementation of lattice division functions establishes a partnership relation among parallel processes. We propose that this relation can efficiently map on the multicore cluster communicational topology. We introduce a new mapping strategy that can obtain benefit in the performance by adapting its communication pattern to the hardware affinities among processes allocated in different cores. We apply our approach to a two-dimensional application achieving sensible execution time reduction.