Accelerating Lava Flows Simulations with GPGPU and OpenCL

The introduction of the GPU (graphics processing units) has marked a revolution in the field of Parallel Computing allowing to achieve computational performance unimaginable until a few years ago. Widely adopted in the Scientific Computing Field, this hardware has proven to be extremely reliable and suitable to simulate Cellular Automata (CA) models for modeling complex systems whose evolution can be described in terms of local interactions. This paper presents an effective implementation of a well-known numerical model for simulating lava flows on Graphical Processing Units (GPU) based on the OpenCL (Open Computing Language) standard. Carried out experiments show that significant performance improvements in terms of speedup are achieved, adopting also some original optimizations strategies, confirming the validity of OpenCL and both lowcost and high-end graphics hardware as an alternative to expensive solutions for the simulation of CA models.