An FPGA-Based Architecture to Simulate Cellular Automata with Large Neighborhoods in Real Time

• Main Authors: Kyparissas, Nikolaos, Dollas, Apostolos
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Automata; Cellular Automata; Computational modeling; Computer architecture; Engines; Field programmable gate arrays; FPGA; Graphics; Large Neighborhood; Microprocessors; real time
• ISSN: 1946-1488
• DOI: 10.1109/FPL.2019.00024

In this paper we present a reconfigurable logic-based parallel architecture for the computation of 29X29 large-neighborhood cellular automata at 60 frames-per-second (FPS) real time update rate, using a small FPGA. The computation for each one of the n 2 elements of a two-dimensional input is O(k 2 ), where k is the size of the neighborhood in each dimension. All buffering and computation is performed internally in the FPGA. In terms of performance results, our architecture outperforms a general-purpose CPU running highly optimized software programmed in C by up to 51×; in neighborhoods up to 11×11 in which there are published results from GPUs our architecture has similar performance to GPUs at one-tenth the energy requirements, however, our architecture has the same performance for 29×29 neighborhoods whereas GPU performance drops as neighborhood grows. We expect this work to provide enabling new tools for the use of cellular automata models in the physical sciences.