Erlang-based desynchronized urban traffic simulation for high-performance computing systems

The problem of simulating micro-scale urban traffic in large environments provides a great opportunity for the utilization of HPC systems. Parallel implementation of this kind of computation (where complex, data-intensive processing must be synchronized) is not straightforward. The simulation presented in this paper is based on the concept of controlled desynchronization of the computations, which does not violate the model. The implementation in the Erlang language uses Erlang distribution mechanisms for building and managing the computing cluster. The presented method makes it possible to simulate 11.5M cars traversing a road system composed of 240K crossroads and 144M possible locations. It provides a linear scalability of up to 19,200 computing cores (where simulation speeds reach 160 steps per second).