On the performance and scalability of an HPC enhanced Multi Agent System based evacuation simulator

This paper presents some of the techniques, algorithms and designs used to enable mass evacuation simulations to take advantage of high performance computing infrastructure. A brief overview of a tsunami mass evacuation simulator capable of simulating urban areas of hundreds of km2 in sub-meter detail is provided. Enhancements to the serial algorithms for path finding reducing the path finding time in 94% and a cache friendly visual boundary extraction algorithm cutting the overall simulation time in 50% are presented. Furthermore the hybrid parallel (distributed memory (MPI) + shared memory (OpenMP)) framework is described. A dynamic load balancing technique reducing the idling time from 50% of the execution time to 3% is presented. Finally measures of the thread parallel strong scalability up to 16 threads of 82.69% and distributed process strong scalability up to 2048 processes of 75.93% are presented.