TRANSIMS: Applications and Development Workshop

April 8–9, 2010
Parallelization of the TRANSIMS Microsimulator - design, development, and performance

Michael Hope
Transportation Research and Analysis Computing Center
Argonne National Laboratory

List of Authors
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Michael Hope
Transportation Research and Analysis Computing Center
Argonne National Laboratory
277 International Drive
West Chicago, IL 60185

Abstract
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The original TRANSIMS Microsimulator was designed as a purely parallel program. As desktop machine performance grew by leaps and bounds it became feasible to do a small microsimulation on a home computer in a reasonable amount of time. Therefore when TRANSIMS was re-written, the parallel microsimulation capability was removed. However, given the tremendous growth in transportation data availability, it is becoming increasingly informative to look at larger transportation systems in fine detail. Fortunately cluster computing performance is at a level where a parallel implementation of the Microsimulator makes looking at a large system in fine detail a reality. This presentation details how the TRANSIMS version 4 Microsimulator was able to be parallelized in order to allow a fine-grained second-by-second simulation of the entire Chicago Metropolitan Area in a reasonable amount of time.

Biography
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Michael Hope has been employed by Argonne-TRACC for nearly three years, one of those years as a graduate student. Michael Hope has an educational background in industrial engineering, simulation, algorithm design, and operations research mathematics. At TRACC he has worked in several core areas related to TRANSIMS development and deployment. These include evacuation modeling and methodology design, TRANSIMS source code parallelization, and most recently development of the TransVis (TRANSIMS Visualizer) software.