Composing fine-grained parallel algorithms for spatial dynamics simulation

Abstract

A class of fine-grained (FG) parallel models and algorithms is defined as a generalization of Cellular Automata (CA). It comprises all CA-modifications, in which two main CA-properties (locality and parallelism of intercell interaction) are preserved, no constraint being imposed on state alphabets and transition functions. A set of methods for composing a complex FG-algorithm out of a number of simple ones is proposed. To make compatible FG-algorithms with different alphabets, a number of algebraic operations on cellular arrays are introduced. The set of proposed composition methods has a two-level structure: the lower level comprises composition of cell transition functions, while the higher level deals with global operators on cellular arrays. For each type of proposed methods an example is given and the domain of application is determined. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.