A Parallel Cellular Tool for Interactive Modeling and Simulation
Giandomenico Spezzano and Domenico Talia
Consortium for Research and Applications of InformaticsSalvatore Di Gregorio, Rocco Rongo, and William Spataro
University of Calabria"Sometimes a complex task can be better accomplished by many small units working independently and interacting with their neighbors than by a central authority trying to control all the steps along the way. So with computation." Here is the gist of cellular automata and of this article. Since their introduction by von Neumann and their later development by Toffoli, Wolfram, and others, cellular automata have seen dual use. They can model complex physical systems in some situations where differential calculus cannot, and they can serve as a paradigm of parallel computing.
Camel, a cellular programming environment implemented in parallel, has been used for several science and engineering applications. The authors describe its use in simulating lava flows, landslides, and highway traffic; and for image processing and genetic algorithms. Camel was used in an actual emergency situation to model a lava flow that threatened a Sicilian town.
Corresponding author: Domenico Talia, ISI-CNR, c/o DEIS, Universitá della Calabria, 87036 Rende (CS), Italy. E-mail: talia@si.deis.unical.it
IEEE Computational Science & Engineering, Vol. 3, No. 3, Fall 1996