Massively Parallel Game of Life

MPI + CUDA implementation of Conway's Game of Life targeting RPI's AiMOS supercomputer (POWER9 + V100 DCS nodes). 2D Cartesian decomposition with toroidal halo exchange; CUDA-aware Spectrum MPI passes device pointers straight to MPI_Isend / MPI_Irecv.

Build

On AiMOS DCS:

module load xl_r spectrum-mpi cuda/11.2
make all

Local development build (no CUDA):

make gol_serial gol_mpi_cpu

Targets produced in bin/:

Binary	Description
gol_serial	Single-process CPU reference. Use as the oracle.
gol_mpi_cpu	MPI parallel, CPU compute step.
gol_mpi_cuda	MPI parallel, CUDA compute step (requires CUDA-aware MPI).
diff_grids	Raw-grid byte-comparison tool.

Run

# Serial
./bin/gol_serial 1024 1024 100 random 1 final.pbm

# MPI / CPU, 4 ranks
mpirun -n 4 ./bin/gol_mpi_cpu --w 1024 --h 1024 --steps 100 --mode cpu

# MPI / CUDA on AiMOS (mpirun), 6 ranks per DCS node
mpirun -n 6 ./bin/gol_mpi_cuda \
      --w 32768 --h 32768 --steps 1000 --mode gpu --kernel overlap \
      --csv bench/results/run.csv --label strong_6

Layout

include/   public headers (clockcycle.h, gol_kernel.h, gol_mpi.h, gol_io.h)
src/       all .c / .cu sources
tools/     diff_grids
scripts/   SLURM submission templates
bench/     run_all.sh harness + plot.py + results CSVs + oracle/
paper/     ACM sigconf LaTeX (main.tex + refs.bib + figures/)

Verification

Run the serial oracle and the parallel build with the same parameters, have both checkpoint the final state, then diff:

./bin/gol_serial 256 256 100 r-pentomino 1 /tmp/serial.pbm  # also dumps raw
mpirun -n 4 ./bin/gol_mpi_cpu --w 256 --h 256 --steps 100 \
       --init r-pentomino --checkpoint-every 100 --checkpoint /tmp/parallel.bin
./bin/diff_grids 256 256 /tmp/serial.bin /tmp/parallel.bin

(The serial binary writes PBM by default; for a raw dump compatible with diff_grids, run the MPI binary on a single rank with --checkpoint.)

Source repository

Mirror: https://github.com/<user>/parallel-group-project (GitHub link included here in case the Submitty tarball is too large.)