CAM-8 Collaborations

Our collaborations focus on doing new science on CAM-8---which will attract good researchers to the CA field---and on demonstrating "breakthrough applications"---applications for which there is a near-term promise that CAM-8's performance will offer a significant advantage.

We have been supporting collaborations by writing initial sample applications with researchers in collaborating groups, by developing, supporting, and modifying programming languages, utilities, and environments for their use, and by maintaining their CAM hardware for them.

Present and planned scientific and application oriented collaborations include

U. S. AIR FORCE: Jeff Yepez and his group at Phillips Laboratory are working on geophysical simulation. They have already made significant advances in simulating phase changes using lattice gases, and have started an initiative to build a big CAM-8 machine. They currently have two copies of our prototype.
MIT MEDIA LAB: Through Neil Gershenfeld and his Physics and Media Group, we have placed a CAM-8 prototype at the Media Lab. Projects are currently being actively pusued to employ CAM-8 for real-time computer-generation of holograms, and for real-time video processing.
MIT POROUS FLOW PROJECT: Dan Rothman, Eirik Flekkoy, and students in Rothman's group are simulating 3D porous flow on CAM-8, using some techniques developed by (and in collaboration with) Bruce Boghosian at Boston University.
MIT NUMESH PROJECT: We have collaborated with Steve Ward and Gill Pratt on clock-synchronization and spatial-architecture issues in this project, based on CAM-8 simulations and architectural ideas. We plan to continue and expand this collaboration.
BOSTON UNIVERSITY: Yaneer Bar-Yam and his group have used a CAM-8 prototype to simulate their CA polymer models, and have found its performance to be comparable to anything they could manage on supercomputers.
BOSTON UNIVERSITY: Bruce Boghosian has been developing lattice gas models of complex fluids, such as micro-emulsions, for which there are no know differential-equation models. We have worked with Bruce on other CAM-8 lattice gas models, and plan to continue in this new domain.
LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY: Gary Doolen and his group at LANL are probably the premier lattice-gas group in the world, and they (led by Brosl Hasslacher) have acquired one of our CAM-8 prototypes to use in their work. There are also several CA researchers there who plan to take advantage of the machine.
U. WISCONSIN, CORNELL U., U.C. DAVIS, COLBY COLLEGE: David Griffeath, Bob Fisch, and a group of mathematicians at these four institutions, have jointly acquired one of our CAM-8 prototypes for their work on statistical properties of CA systems.
NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY: Bryant York and his group at Northeastern have written simulations on CAM-8 to do combinatorial searches using large collections of adjacency matrices that are transformed in parallel. Their first simulations have our prototype performing about on a par with their best code for an 8K-node CM-2 for this application, but their use of our machine is still quite naive.
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO: Ray Kapral and Anna Lawniczak (organizers of a recent major conference on lattice gases) are specialists on the simulation of reaction-diffusion systems. They have a copy of our prototype, and are currently actively developing models on it.
COMMUNICATIONS RESEARCH CENTER (OTTAWA): Neil Simons and his group at CRC, a Canadian government lab, are using a CAM-8 there to develop CA models of the electromagnetic radiation fields around antennas.
ELSAG-BAILEY, ITALY: The Elsag-Bailey company in Italy is interested in acquiring a CAM-8 machine for their research lab, for evaluation of its usefulness for document processing. We have been working with them through Vincenzo D'Andrea, who was a visitor with our group for over a year.
ATR, JAPAN: Hugo DeGaris has aquired a CAM-8 machine for use in CA models of evolving neural networks.

In addition to these collaborations, we have recently had considerable interest in practical CA modeling on CAM-8 from members of the Mechanical, Civil, and Nuclear Engineering communities at MIT, and collaborations with several groups there are likely.

We are currently looking for application-oriented collaborations in the areas of medical image processing, logic simulation and statistical mechanical simulation. In addition, we are also looking into system-software and hardware-oriented collaborations.