A high performance simulator of the immune response

The application of concepts and methods of statistical mechanics to biologi cal problems is one of the most promising frontiers of computational physic s. For instance Cellular Automata (CA), i.e. fully discrete dynamical syste ms evolving according to Boolean laws, appear to be extremely well suited t o the simulation of the immune system dynamics. A prominent example of immu nological CA is represented by the Celada-Seiden automaton that has proven capable of providing several new insights into the dynamics of the immune s ystem response. In the present paper we describe a parallel version of the Celada-Seiden automaton. Details on the parallel implementation as well as performance data on the IBM SP2 parallel platform are presented and comment ed on. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.