GPU Acceleration of Complex Simulations: A Use Case on the Conway’s Game of Life

Abstract

This paper examines the use of GPU acceleration to improve the performance of simulations. More specifically we focus on Conway’s Game of Life, a popular cellular automaton. The results show that utilizing a GPU can greatly increase the speed of the simulation compared to using a traditional CPU. The paper also explores the potential for applying GPU acceleration to other types of simulations and the implications for future research in this field. Our research suggests that GPU acceleration can be a powerful tool for optimizing the performance of complex simulations, and could lead to the development of more efficient and accurate simulations in a variety of fields. To conduct our research, we developed a GPU implementation of the simulation using NVIDIA CUDA and bench-marked it against a CPU implementation. On a medium-sized board - 512x512 cells with 16 generations, we achieved a speed of approximately 7 * 10 7 cells/ms with our GPU implementation, which is 837 times better than our CPU result of 8 * 10 4 cells/ms.