High Speed Computation of Three Dimensional Cellular Automata with FPGA

Abstract

In cellular automata, a single update rule is applied simultaneously to each cell on the lattice. Therefore, many approaches with parallel and distributed systems have been researched. In this paper, we propose a computation method of three dimensional cellular automata for small FPGA systems with limited memory bandwidth. We implemented the method on a FPGA board (Celoxica RC1000 with one Virtex-E XCV2000E). The speed gain for a 3D Life Game and a 3D Forest Fires model with 128 × 128 × 128 lattice is 386 and 79 times compared with Celeron Processor 1.20GHz.