This was an assignment in CS351: Design of Large Programs. It is a multithreaded implementation of Conway's game of life, designed to showcase threaded programming and the performance impact of memory access patterns.
- scrollable with either click-n-drag, scrollbars, or cursor/page up/page down keys.
- 'Reset' button will re-seed the grid with random values The spinner next to the play button selects the number of threads.
- Allowed values are in [1, NUM_CPU_CORES * 2] (to allow for testing of what happens when more threads than cores are used)
- This number is calculated at the start of the program, so you will have to restart it if you somehow manage to add more CPUs to a live system
- The dropdown selects a preset for the load button to load
- Contains 6 presets:
- A 'blank' preset that loads an empty grid
- A Turing Machine taken from http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Turing_machine
- A 2-period oscillator called the 'ring of fire' from http://conwaylife.com/wiki/Ring_of_fire
- A gun that fires ships taken from http://conwaylife.com/wiki/3-engine_Cordership_gun
- A rake (a ship that fires ships) taken from http://conwaylife.com/wiki/3-engine_Cordership_rake
- A calculator of Fermat primes taken from http://conwaylife.com/wiki/Fermat_prime_calculator
- The pattern destroys a section of itself when a Fermat prime is found.
- A number N is tested for Fermat primality around generation 120N-550, and the pattern destroys a section of itself each time a prime is found
- the pattern is rigged to completely self-destruct if a Fermat prime larger than 65537 (the largest known) is found.