Urban traffic simulation modeling for reconfigurable hardware

TRANSIMS (Barrett and et al, 2002) is a large-scale simulation system capable of modeling traffic of entire metropolitan areas such as Portland and Chicago. In this paper we present a traffic model based on the TRANSIMS micro-simulator that targets reconfigurable hardware. We give the general model, and also present the modeling aspects that are specific to our implementation target which is Cray XD1. The prototype implementation, although in its early stages and not optimized, is able to achieve 34x speed up over software alone. This work demonstrates that partitioning and system integration issues play a crucial role in realizable speed up for hybrid simulation systems.