May 2006

Conference Paper

Discrete-Event Execution Alternatives on General Purpose Graphical Processing Units

By:
Perumalla, Kalyan S
Page Number:
50
Book Title:
Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM/SCS Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation
Publication Date:
May 2006
Conference Name:
Intl Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation
Conference Location:
Singapore, Singapore
Conference Sponsor:
IEEE/ACM/SCS

Abstract

Graphics cards, traditionally designed as accelerators for computer graphics, have evolved to support more general-purpose computation. General Purpose Graphical Processing Units (GPGPUs) are now being used as highly efficient, cost-effective platforms for executing certain simulation applications. While most of these applications belong to the category of time-stepped simulations, little is known about the applicability of GPGPUs to discrete event simulation (DES). Here, we identify some of the issues & challenges that the GPGPU stream-based interface raises for DES, and present some possible approaches to moving DES to GPGPUs. Initial performance results on simulation of a diffusion process show that DES-style execution on GPGPU runs faster than DES on CPU and also significantly faster than time-stepped simulations on either CPU or GPGPU.