Simulation of Discrete Systems with Local Interactions: A Conceptual Model for Massive Parallel Processing

A major difficulty of massive parallel processing (MPP) is that the hardware for communications and memory sharing inevitably gets more and more complicated with the increase of processing units. But in fact and many application of MPP can be abstracted as simulations of locally interactive discrete systems that have a fully parallel and general algorithm with purely local operations. Theoretically, a specialized MPP machine for this purpose can be expanded forever without complicating the system architecture, and a linear increase of computational capacity with the number of processing units can be reached. This would be the most economic system we can expect. In this paper, the algorithm, system architecture and applicable fields for such specialization are explored preliminarily.