Efficient implementation of cellular algorithms on reconfigurable hardware

Reconfigurable architectures represent an innovative approach to the computer system design paradigm, which tries to cope with a problem of inefficiency of conventional computing systems, due to their general purpose nature. On the other hand, cellular automata are attractive computing models due to their fine grain parallelism, simple computational structures and local communication patterns. The inherently parallel cellular automata model is well suited to be implemented on reconfigurable hardware architectures such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) that can provide significant speedup. This paper describes the CAREM system that provides an efficient implementation of cellular automata algorithms on FPGA systems exploiting their reconfigurable features for executing different cellular automata rules. Its application to an image processing application and a forest fire simulation are presented and discussed. Performance evaluation and comparison with different implementations of cellular automata are presented.