Miguel A. Martínez-del-Amor

Simulation of P systems with active membranes on CUDA

P systems or membrane systems provide a high level computational modeling framework that combines the structural and dynamic aspects of biological systems in a relevant and understandable way. P systems are massively parallel distributed, and non-deterministic systems. In this paper, we describe the implementation of a simulator for the class of recognizer P systems with active membranes by using the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). We compare the high performance parallel simulator for the GPU to the simulator developed on a single CPU (Central Processing Unit), and we show that the GPU is better suited than the CPU to simulate P systems due to its highly parallel nature.

Simulating a P system based efficient solution to SAT by using GPUs

Abstract P systems are inherently parallel and non-deterministic theoretical computing devices defined inside the field of Membrane Computing. Many P system simulators have been presented in this area, but they are inefficient since they cannot handle the parallelism of these devices. Nowadays, we are witnessing the consolidation of the GPUs as a parallel framework to compute general purpose applications. In this paper, we analyse GPUs as an alternative parallel architecture to improve the performance in the simulation of P systems, and we illustrate it by using the case study of a family of P systems that provides an efficient and uniform solution to the SAT problem. Firstly, we develop a simulator that fully simulates the computation of the P system, demonstrating that GPUs are well suited to simulate them. Then, we adapt this simulator to the GPU architecture idiosyncrasies, improving the performance of the previous simulator.

The GPU on the simulation of cellular computing models

Membrane Computing is a discipline aiming to abstract formal computing models, called membrane systems or P systems, from the structure and functioning of the living cells as well as from the cooperation of cells in tissues, organs, and other higher order structures. This framework provides polynomial time solutions to NP-complete problems by trading space for time, and whose efficient simulation poses challenges in three different aspects: an intrinsic massively parallelism of P systems, an exponential computational workspace, and a non-intensive floating point nature. In this paper, we analyze the simulation of a family of recognizer P systems with active membranes that solves the Satisfiability problem in linear time on different instances of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). For an efficient handling of the exponential workspace created by the P systems computation, we enable different data policies to increase memory bandwidth and exploit data locality through tiling and dynamic queues. Parallelism inherent to the target P system is also managed to demonstrate that GPUs offer a valid alternative for high-performance computing at a considerably lower cost. Furthermore, scalability is demonstrated on the way to the largest problem size we were able to run, and considering the new hardware generation from Nvidia, Fermi, for a total speed-up exceeding four orders of magnitude when running our simulations on the Tesla S2050 server.

DCBA: simulating population dynamics p systems with proportional object distribution

Population Dynamics P systems provide a formal framework for ecological modelling having a probabilistic (while keeping the maximal parallelism). Several simulation algorithms have been developed always trying to reach higher reliability in the way they reproduce the behaviour of the ecosystems being modelled. It is natural for those algorithms to classify the rules into blocks, comprising rules that share identical left-hand side. Previous algorithms, such as the Binomial Block Based (BBB) or the Direct Non Deterministic distribution with Probabilities (DNDP), do not define a deterministic behaviour for blocks of rules competing for the same resources. In this paper we introduce the Direct distribution based on Consistent Blocks Algorithm (DCBA), a simulation algorithm which addresses that inherent non-determinism of the model by distributing proportionally the resources.

Matrix representation of spiking neural P systems

Spiking neural P systems (SN P systems, for short) are a class of distributed parallel computing devices inspired from the way neurons communicate by means of spikes. In this work, a discrete structure representation of SN P systems with extended rules and without delay is proposed. Specifically, matrices are used to represent SN P systems. In order to represent the computations of SN P systems by matrices, configuration vectors are defined to monitor the number of spikes in each neuron at any given configuration; transition net gain vectors are also introduced to quantify the total amount of spikes consumed and produced after the chosen rules are applied. Nondeterminism of the systems is assured by a set of spiking transition vectors that could be used at any given time during the computation. With such matrix representation, it is quite convenient to determine the next configuration from a given configuration, since it involves only multiplication and addition of matrices after deciding the spiking transition vector.

Population dynamics p systems on CUDA

Population Dynamics P systems (PDP systems, in short) provide a new formal bio-inspired modeling framework, which has been successfully used by ecologists. These models are validated using software tools against actual measurements. The goal is to use P systems simulations to adopt a priori management strategies for real ecosystems. Software for PDP systems is still in an early stage. The simulation of PDP systems is both computationally and data intensive for large models. Therefore, the development of efficient simulators is needed for this field. In this paper, we introduce a novel simulator for PDP systems accelerated by the use of the computational power of GPUs. We discuss the implementation of each part of the simulator, and show how to achieve up to a 7x speedup on a NVIDA Tesla C1060 compared to an optimized multicore version on a Intel 4-core i5 Xeon for large systems. Other results and testing methodologies are also included.

Simulating P Systems on GPU Devices: A Survey

P systems have been proven to be useful as modeling tools in many fields, such as Systems Biology and Ecological Modeling. For such applications, the acceleration of P system simulation is often desired, given the computational needs derived from these kinds of models. One promising solution is to implement the inherent parallelism of P systems on platforms with parallel architectures. In this respect, GPU computing proved to be an alternative to more classic approaches in Parallel Computing. It provides a low cost, and a manycore platform with a high level of parallelism. The GPU has been already employed to speedup the simulation of P systems. In this paper, we look over the available parallel P systems simulators on the GPU, with special emphasis on those included in the PMCGPU project, and analyze some useful guidelines for future implementations and developments.

Simulating Spiking Neural P Systems Without Delays Using GPUs

We present in this paper our work regarding simulating a type of P system known as a spiking neural P system (SNP system) using graphics processing units (GPUs). GPUs, because of their architectural optimization for parallel computations, are well-suited for highly parallelizable problems. Due to the advent of general purpose GPU computing in recent years, GPUs are not limited to graphics and video processing alone, but include computationally intensive scientific and mathematical applications as well. Moreover P systems, including SNP systems, are inherently and maximally parallel computing models whose inspirations are taken from the functioning and dynamics of a living cell. In particular, SNP systems try to give a modest but formal representation of a special type of cell known as the neuron and their interactions with one another. The nature of SNP systems allowed their representation as matrices, which is a crucial step in simulating them on highly parallel devices such as GPUs. The highly parallel nature of SNP systems necessitate the use of hardware intended for parallel computations. The simulation algorithms, design considerations, and implementation are presented. Finally, simulation results, observations, and analyses using an SNP system that generates all numbers in

A P-Lingua based simulator for tissue P systems

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Spiking neural P system simulations on a high performance GPU platform

- {1} are discussed, as well as recommendations for future work.