Kees van Berkel
Technical University Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Computing with Cellular Automata
Abstract
Cellular automata (CA) were invented by John von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam in the early 1950s and became popular with John Conway’s Game of Life in the early 1970s. A CA is a model of computation, which is Turing complete (universal), inherently parallel (say, billions of cells), and inherently local (only communication among neighbor cells). As such, they seem the perfect match for upcoming CMOS and packaging technologies. Yet, today CA applications and CA machines form a rather marginal R&D topic.
This presentation explores applications of CA (including quantum mechanics), possible hardware architectures for CA, as well as mapping techniques. What are cellular automata good for? Might they offer a viable path to zettascale computing?
Biography
Kees van Berkel received an MSc degree in EE from TU Delft and a PhD degree in CS from TU Eindhoven. From 1980 to 2014 he worked in industry (Philips Research, NXP, ST-Ericsson, and Ericsson), and from 1996 to 2023 he was a part-time full professor at TU Eindhoven. He pioneered asynchronous VLSI from theory to mass production, and likewise for vector processors for software-defined radio. His current research interest is parallel models of computation: dataflow, cellular automata, neural networks, and quantum computing. His favorite application domain is radio astronomy.
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