Monte Carlo Simulations of Settlement Dynamics in GPUs

Abstract

Recently, a Monte Carlo model was proposed in order 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: (Formula presented.) 8 (Formula presented.) to (Formula presented.) 20 (Formula presented.) with the Baseline case in a NVIDIA Tesla C2050 versus a Phenom 1055T CPU. The Realistic case obtained (Formula presented.) 80 (Formula presented.) of speedup in the same hardware. The GPU performance of the code will allow the inclusion of additional factors affecting settlements and large grid sizes for detailed environmental degradation models.