Multi-agent traffic simulation with CUDA

• Published in: 2009 International Conference on High Performance Computing and Simulation pp. 106 - 114
• Main Authors: Strippgen, D., Nagel, K.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.06.2009
• Subjects: Computational modeling; Computer architecture; CUDA; Data structures; Genetic algorithms; GPGPU; GPU; Graphics; Hardware; large-scale simulation; Large-scale systems; multi agent simulation; multi-core; Telecommunication traffic; Traffic control; Yarn
• ISBN: 1424449065; 9781424449064
• DOI: 10.1109/HPCSIM.2009.5192895

Today's graphics processing units (GPU) have tremendous resources when it comes to raw computing power. The simulation of large groups of agents in transport simulation has a huge demand of computation time. Therefore it seems reasonable to try to harvest this computing power for traffic simulation. Unfortunately simulating a network of traffic is inherently connected with random memory access. This is not a domain that the SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) architecture of GPUs is known to work well with. In this paper the authors will try to achieve a speedup by computing multi-agent traffic simulations on the graphics device using NVIDIA's CUDA framework.