Computational Science Technical Note CSTN-107

Simulating Opinion Formation Models Using Data Parallelism with GPUs and OpenCL

K.A. Hawick

Archived December 2009

Abstract

The Sznajd model of opinion formation exhibits complex phase transitional and growth behaviour and can be studied with numerical simulations ona number of different network structures. Large system sizes and detailed statistical sampling of the model both require data-parallel computing to accelerate simulation performance. Data structures and computational performance issues are reported for square, cubic, and higher dimensional system simulations on single and multi-core processing devices. A discussion of optimal data structures for performance on Graphical Processing Units using NVIDIA's Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) and the multi-vendor supported open compute langyage (OpenCL) specification is also given. System size and memory layout tradeoffs for different processing devices are also presented.

Keywords: opinion formation model; interdisciplinary simulation; data-parallelism; OpenCL; GPU; CUDA

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