GOL

Inspired by a speed challege posted for a Game of Life lab from Intro to Computer Systems course at Swarthmore College.

Notes

This implementation applies threading, AVX2 SIMD instructions, and bit masks to achieve 100 to 120 times faster performance than initial implementation, depending on world size.

For progress notes, please take a look at ChallengeNotes.adoc. Times provided there were tested on a Linux system with Intel Xeon E5-1650 (6 cores, 12 threads).

Code rewritten from https://github.swarthmore.edu/CS31-F22/Lab6-kcao1-wrisse1 (coursework private repo) to remove dependency of a visualization library. Program structure is retained from coursework implementation.

Compilation & Usage

Compile with GNU Make

make all

To run provided challenge files:

#./barrsimd <file name> <0|1, enables or disables ASCII> <thread count>
# Example:
./barrsimd ./challenges/challenge_500.txt 0 12
# runs challenge_500.txt with no ASCII animation and 12 threads.

To create a new challenge file, provide a text file with game board height, width, turn count, no. of live cells at start, and coordinates of each cell.

Contact

Feel free to open an issue or reach out to [email protected] for any questions!

License

MIT