An embarrassingly parallel algorithm for random walk simulations on random fractal structures

Anomalous diffusion is often simulated by random walks on random fractal structures. As existing simulation methods either lack a high degree of parallelism or impose restrictions on the choice of fractal structures, a new approach is proposed here. We present a parallel algorithm for simulating random walks on fractal structures that is suitable for a wide variety of hardware architectures. The degree of parallelism of the algorithm equals the number of random walkers, which is achieved by its communication-avoiding design. In contrast to other approaches, the random fractal structure is not pre-computed at whole. Instead, only the surrounding of each random walker is calculated by the parallel threads while the random walker moves around on the fractal structure. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.