A New Approach to Modeling Physical Systems: Discrete Event Simulations of Grid-based Models

The traditional technique to simulate physical systems modeled by partial differential equations is by means of a time-stepped methodology where the state of the system is updated at regular discrete time intervals. This method has inherent inefficiencies. In contrast, we propose a new asynchronous type of simulation based on a discrete-event-driven (as opposed to time-driven) approach, where the state of the simulation is updated on a "need-to-be-done-only" basis. Here we report on this new technique, show an example, and briefly discuss additional issues that we are addressing concerning algorithm development and their parallel execution.