6,784 research outputs found
Parallel Implementations of Cellular Automata for Traffic Models
The Biham-Middleton-Levine (BML) traffic model is a simple two-dimensional,
discrete Cellular Automaton (CA) that has been used to study self-organization
and phase transitions arising in traffic flows. From the computational point of
view, the BML model exhibits the usual features of discrete CA, where the state
of the automaton are updated according to simple rules that depend on the state
of each cell and its neighbors. In this paper we study the impact of various
optimizations for speeding up CA computations by using the BML model as a case
study. In particular, we describe and analyze the impact of several parallel
implementations that rely on CPU features, such as multiple cores or SIMD
instructions, and on GPUs. Experimental evaluation provides quantitative
measures of the payoff of each technique in terms of speedup with respect to a
plain serial implementation. Our findings show that the performance gap between
CPU and GPU implementations of the BML traffic model can be reduced by clever
exploitation of all CPU features
LF-PPL: A Low-Level First Order Probabilistic Programming Language for Non-Differentiable Models
We develop a new Low-level, First-order Probabilistic Programming Language
(LF-PPL) suited for models containing a mix of continuous, discrete, and/or
piecewise-continuous variables. The key success of this language and its
compilation scheme is in its ability to automatically distinguish parameters
the density function is discontinuous with respect to, while further providing
runtime checks for boundary crossings. This enables the introduction of new
inference engines that are able to exploit gradient information, while
remaining efficient for models which are not everywhere differentiable. We
demonstrate this ability by incorporating a discontinuous Hamiltonian Monte
Carlo (DHMC) inference engine that is able to deliver automated and efficient
inference for non-differentiable models. Our system is backed up by a
mathematical formalism that ensures that any model expressed in this language
has a density with measure zero discontinuities to maintain the validity of the
inference engine.Comment: Published in the proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on
Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS
Emissivity: A Program for Atomic Emissivity Calculations
In this article we report the release of a new program for calculating the
emissivity of atomic transitions. The program, which can be obtained with its
documentation from our website www.scienceware.net, passed various rigorous
tests and was used by the author to generate theoretical data and analyze
observational data. It is particularly useful for investigating atomic
transition lines in astronomical context as the program is capable of
generating a huge amount of theoretical data and comparing it to observational
list of lines. A number of atomic transition algorithms and analytical
techniques are implemented within the program and can be very useful in various
situations. The program can be described as fast and efficient. Moreover, it
requires modest computational resources.Comment: 20 pages, 0 figures, 0 table
A practical guide to computer simulations
Here practical aspects of conducting research via computer simulations are
discussed. The following issues are addressed: software engineering,
object-oriented software development, programming style, macros, make files,
scripts, libraries, random numbers, testing, debugging, data plotting, curve
fitting, finite-size scaling, information retrieval, and preparing
presentations.
Because of the limited space, usually only short introductions to the
specific areas are given and references to more extensive literature are cited.
All examples of code are in C/C++.Comment: 69 pages, with permission of Wiley-VCH, see http://www.wiley-vch.de
(some screenshots with poor quality due to arXiv size restrictions) A
comprehensively extended version will appear in spring 2009 as book at
Word-Scientific, see http://www.worldscibooks.com/physics/6988.htm
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