CAOS: A Domain-Specific Language for the Parallel Simulation of Cellular Automata

Abstract

We present the design and implementation of CAOS, a domain-specific high-level programming language for the parallel simulation of extended cellular automata. CAOS allows scientists to specify complex simulations with limited programming skills and effort. Yet the CAOS compiler generates efficiently executable code that automatically harnesses the potential of contemporary multi-core processors, shared memory multiprocessors, workstation clusters and supercomputers.

Design and Implementation of CAOS: An Implicitly Parallel Language for the High-Performance Simulation of Cellular Automata

“…Secondly, we are working on completing the CAOS language by support for agents that substantially increase the expressiveness of CAOS for advanced simulation. Further information on the CAOS project, including a technical report that covers compilation in-depth Grelck & Penczek (2007) Cellular automata make up a class of completely discrete dynamical systems, which have became a core subject in the sciences of complexity due to their conceptual simplicity, easiness of implementation for computer simulation, and their ability to exhibit a wide variety of amazingly complex behavior. The feature of simplicity behind complexity of cellular automata has attracted the researchers' attention from a wide range of divergent fields of study of science, which extend from the exact disciplines of mathematical physics up to the social ones, and beyond.…”

“…A list of all compiled-in parameters is displayed within the help text of the binary (-help option). For a more detailed treatment of the semantics of these parameters and for an in-depth discussion of all implementation details, please see Grelck & Penczek (2007).…”

Organizing the Aggregate: Languages for Spatial Computing

“…The other direction from which field languages have been developed is cellular automata. A number languages have been developed to allow succinct specification of cellular automata: examples include the CAM-8 assembly language (Margolus, 1993), ALPACA (Pressey, 2012), CANL (Calidonna and Furnari, 2004), CAOS (Grelck et al, 2007), CARPET (Spezzano and Talia, 1997), CELLANG (Eckart, 1997), JCASim (Freiwald and Weimar, 2002), and Trend/jTrend (Chou et al, 2002), as well as Echo (Forrest and Jones, 1994) and NetLogo (Sklar, 2007) already discussed in previous sections. Because they are all describing the same computational model, these languages are all fairly similar: essentially declarative specifications of the neighborhood structure and rules for the evolution of cells.…”