Glider

Glider is a distributed two-dimensional automaton written in C and utilizing MPI (Message Passing Interface). It provides a distributed solution for running and visualizing cellular automaton simulations.

Building the Project

The project can be compiled using the provided Makefile in the src/ directory.

cd src/ && make

Usage

To print the usage, run the automaton executable with the --help argument:

./automaton --help

This will output:

Usage: automaton [OPTION...] [SEED]...
MPI-based distributed 2D cellular automaton.

  -e, --early_stopping=NUM   If 0, early stopping is suppressed.
  -i, --print_interval=NUM   Number of steps between printing stats.
  -l, --length=NUM           Side length.
  -m, --max_steps=NUM        Maximum number of steps.
  -p, --prob=NUM             Probability of a cell being alive.
  -w, --write_to_file=NUM    If 0, final IO is suppressed.
  -?, --help                 Give this help list
      --usage                Give a short usage message
  -V, --version              Print program version

Mandatory or optional arguments to long options are also mandatory or optional for any corresponding short options.

Example

For example, to run the automaton using 8 processes and to print statistics every 10 iterations, with a side length of the 2D array of 1000, use:

mpirun -n 8 ./automaton -i 10 -l 500 -m 1000 -w 1 3