Monte Carlo simulations of settlement dynamics in GPUs

Recently, a Monte Carlo model was proposed in order to simulate settlement dynamics in drylands, including several environmental factors, and it was implemented as a serial CPU code. In this work we present a parallel implementation of that code using graphics processing units (GPU) and NVIDIA CUDA. The code was tested with two experiments, a Baseline case and a Realistic case. We take advantage of the GPU architecture to obtain significant speedups: $$\sim $$~8$$\times $$× to $$\sim $$~20$$\times $$× with the Baseline case in a NVIDIA Tesla C2050 versus a Phenom 1055T CPU. The Realistic case obtained $$\sim $$~80$$\times $$× of speedup in the same hardware. The GPU performance of the code will allow the inclusion of additional factors affecting settlements and large grid sizes for detailed environmental degradation models.