Nikolaos Kyparissas, undergraduate ECE student, participated in the Xilinx Open Hardware 2018 design competition with his project: “A Parallel Framework for Simulating Cellular Automata on FPGA Logic” under the guidance of Professor Apostolos Dollas and reached finalist status in the competition, with the corresponding recognition in the official competition web site.
This entry placed in the top 5 in the undegraduate and graduate students category where 2 awards were given. There were almost 100 entries to the competition and the participants were PhD, Master’s or Bachelor’s students.
The main contribution of this work is that with the use of FPGA technology one can simulate large cellular automata, with rules up to 21X21 (whereas typically these are 3X3 or 5X5) on large grids, with very realistic results on the modelling of physical processes, and at a 40-50 times speedup vs. highly optimized code on a recent generation multi-core general-purpose processor. The illustration is from one such model, in which atoms get attracted to each other during simulation to become molecules.
The finalists and winners in each category can be found here: http://www.openhw.eu/2018-finalists.html
A brief video of the project itself can be seen at:
