OpenACC parallelization of stochastic simulations on GPUs

Abstract

We present an OpenACC-based parallelization implementation of stochastic algorithms for simulating biochemical reaction networks on modern GPUs (graphics processing units). To investigate the effectiveness of using OpenACC for leveraging the massive hardware parallelism of the GPU architecture, we carefully apply OpenACC's language constructs and mechanisms to implementing a parallel version of stochastic simulation algorithms on the GPU. Using our OpenACC implementation in comparison to both the NVidia CUDA and the CPU-based implementations, we report our initial experiences on OpenACC's performance and programming productivity in the context of GPU-accelerated scientific computing.