A Multithread Scientific Library for Complex Systems.
William Spataro, Donato D’Ambrosio, Giuseppe Filippone, Rocco Rongo, Giuseppe Spingola, Pietro Zaccaro, Giuseppe Zito · Conference on Scientific Computing · 2010
Cellular Automata are parallel computing models used for the modeling and simulation of complex systems. This paper presents the latest release of libAuToti, an open-source parallel library for implementing models based on the Cellular Automata approach. The library permits a straightforward and simple implementation of Macroscopic Cellular Automata models, which are appropriate for the simulation of spatial extended dynamical systems. With the emergence of multi-processor computers, multithreaded programming is quickly gaining popularity. Therefore, the current version of the library introduces the possibility to implement multithread versions of models, in order to better exploit multi-core architectures. Scientific visualization of implemented models is also possible thanks to the adoption of a 3D interactive VTK (Visualization Toolkit) module. Experiments, performed by considering the simulation of lava flows as defined by the SCIARA model and executed both on an Intel Xeon 8 core machine and a dual-core standard PC, have demonstrated the elevated computational efficiency of the library, confirming the reliability of the library and goodness of simulation results. Future improvements and possible applications are discussed at the end of the paper.