Research Group on Natural Computing

In order to provide efficient software tools to deal with large membrane
systems, high-throughput simulators are required. Parallel computing platforms are good
candidates, since they are capable of partially implementing the inherently parallel nature
of the model. In this concern, today GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit) are considered as
highly parallel processors, and they are being consolidated as accelerators for scientific
applications. In fact, previous attempts to design P systems simulators on GPUs have
shown that a parallel architecture is better suited in performance than traditional single
CPUs.
In 2010, a GPU-based simulator was introduced for a family of P systems with active
membranes solving SAT in linear time. This is the starting point of this paper, which
presents a new GPU simulator for another polynomial-time solution to SAT by means of
tissue P systems with cell division, trading space for time. The aim of this simulator is
to further study which ingredients of different P systems models are well suited to be
managed by the GPU.