Strategies for Parallel Execution of Cellular Automata in Distributed Memory Architectures

The Cellular Automata paradigm is an efficient tool to model and study complex systems such as traffic simulation, lava flows and swarm based behaviour. In addition, cellular automata can be profitably used in many mathematical problems such as differential equations and chaos theory. Due to their inherent parallel nature, cellular automata can be efficiently parallelized among a set of computing nodes in order to scale and speed up their execution. This paper presents a preliminary study on different parallelizzation techniques for structured grid models such as cellular automata on distributed memory architectures. In particular, three strategies are presented and compared in order to evaluate their efficiency in terms of speed-up. An experimental section shows the performance achieved by the three strategies when a real-life application, namely the SciddicaT cellular automata model for debris-flows simulation, is adopted.