SIMDgameoflife

Vectorized (AVX) version of the game of life

Conway's Game of Life is a classical cellular automaton dating back to the 1970s and still studied to this day. It serves as a crude model for the emergence of life from an initial chaos.

The rules are simple. From a boolean grid, where things are either alive or dead, we count the number of "alive" neighbours (up to 8) that each cell has, then we apply these rules:

• Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies.
• Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies.
• Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell.

Each time we iterate through the grid, we have to visit all cells and apply these rules, generating a new grid. How quickly could we do so?

Requirements

This code assumes a Linux/macOS setup with the libpng library installed. A GCC/clang compiler with make support is necessary.

A recent x64 processor with AVX2 support is best, for this project to make sense.

Usage

We compute 100 iterations, generating PNG figures for the last two iterations. The size of the grid is a parameter.

make
./gameoflife  10000
./gameoflife  10000 --nosimd