Optimizing Cellular Automata Execution by Distributed Discrete Event Simulation Techniques

Cellular Automata (CA) are parallel models well suited for studying complex systems that are based on local rules of evolution. Notable examples of application are found in fluid-dynamics, crowd simulation, flow-simulation and many more. Nevertheless, CA can be fruitfully exploited as a support in numerical approaches, such as finite element and finite volume methods. Though easily parallelizable by domain partitioning among the nodes of a parallel system, the performance and scalability of cellular automata executed on parallel/distributed machines are limited due to the need of synchronizing nodes at each computational step. With the aim of reducing the synchronization burden, we here present a preliminary study on techniques stemmed from the Discrete Event Simulation field for the optimization of CA on distributed memory architectures. Preliminary results, executed in a distributed memory environment, have shown the usefulness of the considered approach in reducing execution times and therefore in improving the speed up of the parallel execution of the test case.