Metropolitan road traffic simulation on FPGAs

This work demonstrates that road traffic simulation of entire metropolitan areas is possible with reconfigurable supercomputing that combines 64-bit microprocessors and FPGAs in a high bandwidth, low latency interconnect. Previously, traffic simulation on FPGAs was limited to very-short road segments or required a very large number of FPGAs. Our data streaming approach overcomes scaling issues associated with direct implementations and still allows for high-level parallelism by dividing the data sets between hardware and software across the reconfigurable supercomputer. Using one FPGA on the Cray XD1 supercomputer, we are able to achieve a 34.4× speed up over the AMD microprocessor. System integration issues must be optimized to exploit this speedup in the overall simulation.