Division of Road Traffic Network for Distributed Simulation Performed on Heterogeneous Clusters

The computer simulation of road traffic is an important tool for analysis and control of actual or designed traffic networks. Because even one simulation run of a large traffic network can be very time consuming and multiple simulation runs are often required, many simulators of road traffic have been adapted for distributed computational environment. There, the combined power of multiple interconnected computers (nodes) is utilized. Adaptation of the simulation for this environment means that the traffic network is divided into sub-networks, whose simulations are then performed on the particular nodes of the distributed computer. In order to maximally utilize the power of each computer (i.e. to ensure the maximal speed of the distributed simulation), the particular sub-networks must be load-balanced. If the target distributed computer is a homogeneous cluster (i.e. each node has the same computational power), the load of particular traffic sub-networks should be similar. However, quite often, the nodes of the distributed computer can be of different computational power (e.g. various desktop computers interconnected by Ethernet network). For such a heterogeneous cluster, the load-balancing means that the load of each sub-network is adapted to the computational power of the node, on which the sub-network will be simulated. This paper describes a method for traffic network division for heterogeneous clusters, which considers different computational powers of the particular nodes. The actual computational power of particular nodes is determined using a set of tests rather than using information about the processor speed, memory size, and so on.