Title
Parallelisation strategies for large scale cellular automata frameworks in pharmaceutical modelling
Abstract
Cellular Automata (CA) properties facilitate the detail required for the bottom-up approach to modelling and simulation of a broad range of physico-chemical reactions. In pharmaceutical applications, CA models use a combination of discrete-event rules based on probabilistic distributions and fundamental physical laws to predict the behaviour of active substances (drug molecules) and structural changes in Drug Dissolution Systems (DDS) over time. Several models of this type have been described so far in the scientific literature. Yet, practical applications are lacking in the context of large-scale, high-precision, high-fidelity simulations. The key obstacle to parallelisation of such models is not only the amount of data involved, but also the fact that many of these models incorporate agent-like behaviour within the CA framework in order to describe pharmaceutical components. This makes communication across process boundaries expensive. In this paper, we apply different parallelisation strategies to a large scale CA framework, used to model coated drug spheres. We use two parallel-computing application programming interfaces (APIs), namely OpenMP and MPI, to partition the simulation space. We analyse the applicability of each API to the problem individually, as well as in the hybrid solution. We examine speedup potential and overhead for local and global communication for simulation speed and solution scalability. For these types of problems, our results show that performance is much improved for appropriate combinations of parallelisation solutions.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1109/HPCSim.2012.6266916
High Performance Computing and Simulation
Keywords
Field
DocType
application program interfaces,cellular automata,drugs,medical computing,message passing,multi-agent systems,parallel processing,probability,API,DDS,MPI,OpenMP,active substance,agent-like behaviour,application programming interface,coated drug sphere,discrete-event rule,drug dissolution system,drug molecule,fundamental physical law,large scale CA framework,large scale cellular automata,parallel-computing,parallelisation strategy,pharmaceutical modelling,physico-chemical reaction,probabilistic distribution,Cellular Automata,HPC,Hybrid models,Modelling,Spatio-temporal model
Cellular automaton,Computer science,Parallel computing,Multi-agent system,Application programming interface,Probabilistic logic,Message passing,Scalability,Speedup,Computational complexity theory
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4673-2359-8
1
0.39
References 
Authors
6
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Marija Bezbradica165.98
Martin Crane216723.21
Heather J. Ruskin311.06