CUDA Dynamic Active Thread List Strategy to Accelerate Debris Flow Simulations

Abstract

Cellular Automata represent a formal frame for dynamical systems which evolve on the base of local interactions. We here present first results of the CUDA parallelization of the SCIDDICA S3-hex Complex Cellular Automata model for simulating debris flows. In particular, a first strategy for the parallelization of the model is based on a straightforward one thread - one cell approach, where each cell in the cellular space is computed by a CUDA thread. A second approach concerns the adoption of a list of CA computational active cells which is handled step by step by an efficient stream compaction algorithm, in order to reduce the excessive use of computationally inactive threads. First results performed on different graphic processors have shown that, by adopting the different CUDA strategies, this kind of hardware can be effective for landslide risk mitigation.