TITLE:
An Approach to Parallel Simulation of Ordinary Differential Equations
AUTHORS:
Joshua D. Carl, Gautam Biswas
KEYWORDS:
Parallel and Multi-Thread Programming, Ordinary Differential Equations, Simulation
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Software Engineering and Applications,
Vol.9 No.5,
May
31,
2016
ABSTRACT: Cyber-physical systems (CPS) represent a
class of complex engineered systems where functionality and behavior emerge
through the interaction between the computational and physical domains.
Simulation provides design engineers with quick and accurate feedback on the
behaviors generated by their designs. However, as systems become more complex,
simulating their behaviors becomes computation all complex. But, most modern
simulation environments still execute on a single thread, which does not take
advantage of the processing power available on modern multi-core CPUs. This
paper investigates methods to partition and simulate differential
equation-based models of cyber-physical systems using multiple threads on
multi-core CPUs that can share data across threads. We describe model
partitioning methods using fixed step and variable step numerical in-tegration
methods that consider the multi-layer cache structure of these CPUs to avoid
simulation performance degradation due to cache conflicts. We study the
effectiveness of each parallel simu-lation algorithm by calculating the
relative speedup compared to a serial simulation applied to a series of large
electric circuit models. We also develop a series of guidelines for maximizing
performance when developing parallel simulation software intended for use on
multi-core CPUs.