Realising massively concurrent systems on the SPACE machine

Highly concurrent systems occur frequently in the physical world. This paper focuses on a class of systems characterised as being highly concurrent and which are composed out of many simple parts which interact with other parts in their locality. It discusses how to describe these systems and introduces a cellular automata type of architecture which is used to simulate these systems directly in hardware, with physical concurrency being realised by true hardware concurrency. The architecture of the SPACE machine (Scalable Parallel Architecture for Concurrency Experiments), which is constructed from reconfigurable FPGA logic, is introduced and it is demonstrated how to simulate road traffic systems using it.<>