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 autom ata theory implemented on a Transputer-based parallel computer. Cellul ar automata were originally defined as a theory to model the basic mec hanisms 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 mor e attractive because they are suitable to be effectively and naturally implemented on parallel computers achieving high performance. CAMEL a llows a user to program computational science applications exploiting the computing power offered by highly parallel computers in a transpar ent way. CAMEL implements a cellular automaton as a SPMD program. A lo ad balancing strategy is used to minimize time costs in case of not un iform intervals for transition steps. In the paper the programming env ironment and the parallel architecture of CAMEL are presented and some experiments are discussed.