MAREX: A general purpose hardware architecture for membrane computing

Membrane computing is an unconventional computing paradigm that has gained much attention in recent decades because of its massively parallel character and its usefulness to build models of complex systems. However, until now, there was no generic hardware implementation of P systems. Computational...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Cascado Caballero, Daniel, Díaz del Río, Fernando, Cagigas Muñiz, Daniel, Ríos Navarro, José Antonio, Guisado Lizar, José Luis, Pérez Hurtado de Mendoza, Ignacio, Riscos Núñez, Agustín
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2022
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Sevilla (US)
Repositorio:idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla
OAI Identifier:oai:idus.us.es:11441/128977
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/11441/128977
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ins.2021.10.064
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Unconventional computing
Parallel architectures
Membrane computing
P systems
Hardware design
Descripción
Sumario:Membrane computing is an unconventional computing paradigm that has gained much attention in recent decades because of its massively parallel character and its usefulness to build models of complex systems. However, until now, there was no generic hardware implementation of P systems. Computational frameworks to execute P systems up to this day rely on the simulation of the parallel working mechanisms of P systems by inherently sequential algorithms. Such algorithms can then be implemented as is or can be parallelized, up to a certain point, to run on parallel computers. However, this is not as efficient as a dedicated parallel hardware implementation. There have been ad hoc implementations of particular P systems for parallel hardware, but they lack to be problem-generic or they are not scalable enough to implement large P systems. In this paper, a first intrinsically parallel hardware architecture to implement generic P system models is introduced. It is designed to be straightforwardly implemented in programmable logic circuits like FPGAs. The feasibility and correct execution of our architecture has been verified by means of a simulator, and several simulation results for different P system examples have been analysed to foresee the pros and cons of this design.