Computational methods for Conway's Game of Life cellular automaton

Gadi Oxman, Shlomo Weiss*, Yair Be'ery

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

The cellular automaton model of computation has drawn the interest of researchers from different disciplines including computer science, biology, mathematics, economy, biochemistry and philosophy. Although a cellular automaton is based on a set of simple rules, over time complex patterns may evolve. We present computational methods for implementing and optimizing a well known two-state cellular automaton, Conway's Game of Life, on a 16-core Intel Xeon. The evaluation is based on three multicore algorithms. The first algorithm is coherent and utilizes shared memory and barrier synchronization. The remaining two algorithms are distributed and utilize private memories and explicit core-to-core message passing. We provide a link to our open source simulation software.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)24-31
Number of pages8
JournalJournal of Computational Science
Volume5
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 2014

Funding

FundersFunder number
Israeli Ministry of Defense
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

    Keywords

    • Cellular automata
    • Computational methods
    • Large-scale problems
    • Modeling
    • Simulation

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