Preface
Dominique Désérable and Rolf Hoffmann
The first special session CAAA 2010 on Cellular Automata Algorithms & Architectures, organized in the framework of the eighth Conference on High Performance Computing & Simulation HPCS 2010, provides an international forum for reporting on the state-of-the-art in computational problems, techniques and solutions related to the implementation of cellular automata models and algorithms onto fine-grain architectures.
Seven previous HPCS events were held in Nottingham (2003), Magdeburg (2004), Riga (2005), Bonn (2006), Prague (2007), Nicosia (2008), Leipzig (2009) and the eighth in Caen (2010). The last HPCS conference was held in Istanbul (2011) and the next is planned to be held in Madrid (2012).
At the time when we decided to create this first special session, we believed that its scope and objectives could find their own specificity within the topics of High Performance Computing & Simulation, complementing other famous events concerning cellular automata in general: ACRI, AUTOMATA, JAC…The specificity of our special session is rightly to emphasize the aspect of High Performance Computing in some class of time-consuming cellular automata applications and to bridge the gap between both communities.
This first CAAA session thus strives to gather all aspects addressed in the main parts of the HPCS conference but which lie at the intersection of the two areas. In other words, topics of interest include all aspects of Cellular Automata, but in the context of High Performance Computing:
Cellular Automata Models & Algorithms
• Local and Global Properties in Cellular Automata Networks
• Local and Global Communications at Application-Level
• Local Neighborhood and Topology Awareness
• Routing and Mobile Agents in Cellular Automata
• Synchronization and Related Problems
• Fine-Grained Parallel Architectures and FPGA
• Efficient Architectures and Implementations
• Regular Graphs for Massive Interconnection Networks
• Scaling and Recursivity in Hierarchical Cayley Graphs
A major part of these topics is covered by the content of this special issue. Four articles constituting a volume of nearly ninety pages altogether were thoroughly reviewed and revised as an extension of the short four companion papers published in the HPCS 20101 proceedings. The first paper deals with large-scale simulations on FPGAs of the stochastic Greenberg-Hastings cellular automaton as a model that mimics the propagation of reaction-diffusion waves in an active medium; the second one with a new optimum Firing Squad Synchronization Problem which embeds 1d synchronization operations onto rectangular arrays by using a “freezing-thawing” technique; the third one with a routing algorithm with mobile agents in the triangular lattice known as multiple target searching; the fourth one with the relationship between CA algorithms and power consumption of 1d CA logic circuits.
The session was opened with one distinguished invited speaker:
• Genaro Juárez Martinez, Computation with competing patterns in Lifelike automaton, a work joined with Andrew Adamatzky, Kenichi Morita, Maurice Margenstern.
It is a pleasure to thank and acknowledge the nineteen members of our Program Committee who kindly accepted to give their contribution to this novel initiative:
• Andrew Adamatzky, UniversityWest England of Bristol, U.K.
• Stefania Bandini, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
• Olga Bandman, Siberian Branch ofAcad. Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia
• Pedro de Oliveira, Mackenzie Presbyterian Univ. of São Paulo, Brazil
• Nazim Fatès, INRIA Nancy – Grand Est, Nancy, France
• Gianluigi Folino, University of Calabria, Italy
• Henryk Fuk´s, Brock University of St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada
• Jarkko Kari, University of Turku, Finland
• Anna Lawniczak, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada
• Genaro Juárez Martinez, UniversityWest England of Bristol, U.K.
• Parimal Pal Chaudhuri, CARL of Kolkata, India
• Franciszek Seredynski, Polish Academy of Sciences,Warsaw, Poland
• Roberto Serra, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy
• Georgios Sirakoulis, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece
• Giandomenico Spezzano, University of Calabria, Italy
• Klaus Sutner, Carnegie Mellon University of Pittsburgh, USA
• Hiroshi Umeo, Electro-Communication University of Osaka, Japan
• ThomasWorsch, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
• AndrewWuensche, UniversityWest England of Bristol, U.K.
Our special thanks to Andrew Adamatzky who invited us to make up this Special Issue of the Journal of Cellular Automata, to Jarkko Kari who extended our publicity action at the time of our first call for papers by including it into the IFIP Working Group 1.5 on Cellular Automata and Discrete Complex Systems and to Genaro Juárez Martinez who also extended our publicity action by including it into a lot of publicity lists. We also want to thank the efforts of the Steering and Organizing Committees of HPCS Caen 2010, especially Waleed Smari and Christophe Rosenberger as Program Chair and General Co-Chair as well as Carsten Trinitis and Sandro Fiore as Special Sessions and Workshops Co-Chairs. As organizers of the CAAA session, we had the honour of receiving a “Certificate of Appreciation” on behalf of the HPCS Steering Committee.
It should be pointed out by the organizers that the idea of this event arose from the opportunity of meeting themselves in Russia as attendees at the Parallel Computing Technologies PaCT conferences, first at PaCT 2007 in Pereslavl-Zalesky during a special session on Cellular Automata, then at PaCT 2009 in Novosibirsk, particularly during a rainy afternoon in the wonderful Bierel resort in Altai mountains and, afterwards, under the impulse of Carsten Trinitis also as a member of the PaCT Program Committee. For this reason, our special thanks are addressed to Victor Malyshkin, Olga Bandman and Maxim Gorodnichev as organizers of the PaCT conferences and their associated “social” events.
Under the auspices of IEEE, ACM, IFIP, CNRS, ENSICAEN – GREYC.
November 9th, 2011
1 Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on High Performance Computing and Simulation (HPCS 2010), June 28 – July 2, 2010, Caen, Normandy, France, W.W. Smari & J.P. McIntire eds., IEEE Catalog Number CFP1078H-PRT, ISBN: 978-I-4244-6828-7