Laser dynamics modelling and simulation: An application of dynamic load balancing of parallel cellular automata

This chapter reviews the application of a biologically inspired heuristic technique - Cellular Automata (CA) - for developing high performance simulations of a well known complex system: the laser.

CA can be described as a class of mathematical systems. They were introduced several decades ago, and are well suited to model spatio-temporal phenomena. On the other hand, CA can be implemented very efficiently on parallel platforms, given both, their intrinsic parallel nature, with all the components working usually in a synchronized way, and the discreteness of the individual components using the same behavior rules. We therefore make use of this feature, and consider the problem of running Parallel CA simulations on non-dedicated clusters of workstations.We thus present results of laser dynamics simulations, traditionally modeled using differential equations.