A PARALLEL CELLULAR-AUTOMATA ENVIRONMENT ON MULTICOMPUTERS FOR COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE

This paper describes CAMEL (Cellular Automata environMent for systEms modeLing), a scalable software environment based on the cellular automata theory implemented on a Transputer-based parallel computer. Cellular automata were originally defined as a theory to model the basic mechanisms of dynamic systems, permitting a new approach which is in many cases simpler and more efficient than the traditional approach based on partial differential equations. Today, cellular automata become more attractive because they are suitable to be effectively and naturally implemented on parallel computers achieving high performance. CAMEL allows a user to program computational science applications exploiting the computing power offered by highly parallel computers in a transparent way. CAMEL implements a cellular automaton as a SPMD program. A load balancing strategy is used to minimize time costs in case of not uniform intervals for transition steps. In the paper the programming environment and the parallel architecture of CAMEL are presented and some experiments are discussed.