Cellular Automata and Cluster Computing: An Application to the Simulation of Laser Dynamics

Abstract

Firstly, the application of a cellular automata (CA) model to simulate the dynamics of lasers is reviewed. With this kind of model, the macroscopic properties of the laser system emerge as a cooperative phenomenon from elementary components locally interacting under simple rules. Secondly, a parallel implementation of this kind of model for distributed-memory parallel computers is presented. Performance and scalability of this parallel implementation running on a computer cluster are analyzed, giving very satisfactory results. This confirms the feasibility of running large 3D simulations -unaffordable on an individual machine -on computer clusters, in order to simulate specific real laser systems.

Developing Efficient Discrete Simulations on Multicore and GPU Architectures

“…As an example, we show in Figure 1, the time evolution of the total number of laser photons and the population inversion in the laser system for parameter values corresponding to a laser spiking regime. The results are the same as those found in previous publications with a sequential implementation, such as [21]. It is shown that the bigger the CA lattice size is, the smoother the results are, since the model reproduces better the macroscopic behavior of the system with a higher statistics.…”

“…In order to reduce the runtime of laser simulations with this model by taking advantage of its parallel nature, a parallel implementation of it for computer clusters (distributed-memory parallel computers), using the message-passing programming paradigm, was introduced in [20,21]. It showed a good performance on dedicated computer clusters [22] and also on heterogeneous non-dedicated clusters with a dynamic load balancing mechanism [23].…”

Laser Dynamics Modelling and Simulation: An Application of Dynamic Load Balancing of Parallel Cellular Automata

“…We first present a summary of experimental results obtained when applying the previously described model to the simulation of laser dynamics (for interested readers, a whole description of results can be found in [3,7,8,9]). We analyze in this section how the CA model of laser dynamics can reproduce different aspects of the phenomenology of laser systems.…”

“…In this section, we describe the parallel implementation of the previous CA model and study its performance and scalability running on a small computer cluster (interested readers can refer to [9], [10], [11] and [12] for a larger description of results obtained). We begin by reviewing previous approaches to parallel implementations of CA models.…”

“…Among the possibilities for establishing the domain decomposition (see [9]), a 1D decomposition has been used, so that the CA is divided into parallel vertical stripes, each of them assigned to a different computer. Extra ghost cells have been included both at the left and right sides of each partition (see Fig.…”