SODECL: An Open-Source Library for Calculating Multiple Orbits of a System of Stochastic Differential Equations in Parallel

Abstract

Stochastic differential equations (SDEs) are widely used to model systems affected by random processes. In general, the analysis of an SDE model requires numerical solutions to be generated many times over multiple parameter combinations. However, this process often requires considerable computational resources to be practicable. Due to the embarrassingly parallel nature of the task, devices such as multi-core processors and graphics processing units (GPUs) can be employed for acceleration.

Here, we present SODECL (https://github.com/avramidis/sodecl), a software library that utilizes such devices to calculate multiple orbits of an SDE model. To evaluate the acceleration provided by SODECL, we compared the time required to calculate multiple orbits of an exemplar stochastic model when one CPU core is used, to the time required when using all CPU cores or a GPU. In addition, to assess scalability, we investigated how model size affected execution time on different parallel compute devices.

Our results show that when using all 32 CPU cores of a high-end high-performance computing node, the task is accelerated by a factor of up to ≈ 6.7, compared to when using a single CPU core. Executing the task on a high-end GPU yielded accelerations of up to ≈ 4.5, compared to a single CPU core.