Accelerating Road Network Simulations using GPUs

Date
30 April 2018 - 15:00-16:00
Location
Broad Lane Lecture Theater 11 (BROAD-LT11)
Speaker
Peter Heywood, University of Sheffield

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Abstract: Road network Simulations are a vital tool used in the planning and management of transport network infrastructure. Large-scale simulations are computationally expensive tasks, taking many-hours for a single simulation to complete using multi-core CPU architectures, hindering the use of large-scale simulations.

Using Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) we demonstrate that both Macroscopic (top-down) simulations and Microscopic (bottom-up) simulations can be considerably accelerated using many-core architectures and novel fine-grained data-parallel algorithms.

A multi-GPU version of the SATURN macroscopic road network simulation package has been developed, demonstrating assignment performance improvements of over 11x compared to a multi-socket CPU. A FLAME GPU based microscopic simulation demonstrates performance improvements of up to 65x using a single GPU compared to the commercial multi-core microsimulation tool Aimsun.

Bio: Peter Heywood is a Research Software Engineer and PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield. His research is focussed on using Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to improve the performance of complex systems simulations; including transport network simulation and biological cellular simulations. Peter has presented his work at multiple international conferences and recently publisheded his work in the Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory Journal.

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