Parallel Computing for Multi-train Movement Simulation on Electrified Railway

This paper discusses the key issues about multi-train movement simulation on electrified railways. A simulation system has been developed for computational simulation and scheme evaluation. Computing traction power network equation is a CPU-intensive work. The Intel^reg architecture processors (Pentium III, Pentium4) introduces streaming SIMD extensions (SSE), that is an efficient execution model to accelerate of applications on a single processor. As an emphasis, the paper discusses the methods to accelerate the calculation of traction power supply. Main procedures have been redesigned by exploiting SIMD parallelism in PC platform. Some approaches about optimizing the parallel algorithm are adopted during their coding procedure such as unrolling the loop and address computation. Experimental results show that the performance of the optimized algorithm has been improved significantly. The biggest speedup ratio obtained has reached 3.35. Compared with convention algorithm, SSE algorithm enhances performance of train movement simulation more than one time.