Presentation
Agent-Based Simulation of Fire Extinguishing: an Assignment for OpenMP, MPI, and CUDA/OpenCL
Event Type
Workshop
W
Education
HPC
Training
TimeSunday, 17 November 20194:35pm - 4:40pm
Location702
DescriptionWe present a new assignment used in a parallel computing course to teach the approaches to the same problem in different parallel programming models. It targets concepts of shared-memory programming with OpenMP, distributed-memory programming with MPI, and/or GPU programming with CUDA or OpenCL. This assignment is based on a simplified agent-based simulation where teams of firefighters aim to extinguish a set of fire focal points in a dynamically evolving scenario. The program is designed to be simple, easy to understand by students, and to include specific parallelization and optimization opportunities. Although there is a quite direct parallel solution in the three programming models, the program has plenty of opportunities for further improvements. It extends the ideas of a previously presented assignment, in order to use more interesting data structures, load balancing techniques, and code optimizations. It has been successfully used in parallel programming contests during a real course, using the performance obtained by the students’ code as a measure of success.
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