Modeling a zombie outbreak with CUDA

http://dotslashed.com/gpu_project2.html

by darkxanthos • 16 years ago

25 11 16 years ago

dotslashed.com

rue• 16 years ago

"View Simulation" (http://dotslashed.com/sim2.swf) link is 404.

woodall• 16 years ago

This may be a different simulation, but try:

http://dotslashed.com/sim1.swf

Luyt• 16 years ago

You can't go wrong with zombies: the public loves them.

It is necessary to initialize all variables. This will cause a run time error.

This probably should read: 'accessing uninitialized variables causes a runtime error'.

It is necessary to check your memory indexes for all data structures, if they are wrong you will have run time errors.

What would be a 'memory index'? An index into an array? Yes indeed, an out-of-bounds array index will cause an error sooner or later. If your language doesn't check array bounds, like C, the bugs will be subtle and insidious.

tmurray3• 16 years ago

As one of the guys responsible for CUDA, this made my day :-)

darkxanthos2• 16 years ago

I came across this trying to learn more about CUDA and OpenCL. Specifically I was trying to find information on bending GPUs to be useful for actor model... zombies were an awesome bonus!

tmurray3• 16 years ago

It's not really suited to CUDA/OpenCL; for the purposes of this discussion, we can treat the two as the same because the execution model of actual kernels is almost identical. The problems are

- the size of the grid is fixed at kernel launch time, so you can't arbitrarily spawn more work

- the completion of one block cannot depend on the execution of another block, which means inter-block communication within a kernel is forbidden

So you could do some sort of block-local actor operation then do an exchange of the halo cells between blocks in another kernel (the only global synchronization point allowed in CUDA/OpenCL), but that seems really painful, especially if actors are sparse within your grid. A work queue approach would probably work better; you'd certainly get better utilization and load balancing than trying to spatially partition a large grid.

flexd• 16 years ago

I can't think of a better way of utilizing spare GPU power. It's important to predict our zombie doom to give us time to prepare.

knowaveragejoe• 16 years ago

Very cool, but the article itself is written very poorly.

flyhighplato• 16 years ago

I was in this class. We all had to do this assignment and it was really fun. Dr. Andy Johnson is a great professor.

Modeling a zombie outbreak with CUDA

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