Large-scale urban traffic simulation with Scala and high-performance computing system

Abstract High-performance computing systems make it possible to implement large-scale simulations of natural phenomena. However, in order to develop efficacious and efficient solutions, easy-to-use software platforms and applications are required. Up until now, the most popular solutions in this area were based on the message passing interface. Next, the authors successfully tackled this problem using Erlang; now, we focus on Scala/Akka — a popular and widely used standard in parallel and distributed programming. The paper focuses on the scalable implementation of a traffic simulation system in an asynchronous and notably desynchronized way. In addition to describing the concept of the system, a series of experiments on a cluster of up to 1000 nodes (24,000 cores) is presented and discussed, showing the efficiency and scalability. The main aim of the paper is to show that the implementation of high-performance computing-grade software solutions lies at the hand of any programmer proficient in Java Virtual Machine-related technologies.

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