P systems or Membrane Systems provide a high-level computational modelling framework that combines the structure and dynamic aspects of biological systems in a relevant and understandable way. They are inherently parallel and non-deterministic computing devices. In this article, we discuss the motivation, design principles and key of the implementation of a simulator for the class of recognizer P systems with active membranes running on a (GPU). We compare our parallel simulator for GPUs to the simulator developed for a single central processing unit (CPU), showing that GPUs are better suited than CPUs to simulate P systems due to their highly parallel nature.

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P systems have been proven to be useful as modeling tools in many fields, such as Systems Biology and Ecological Modeling. For such applications, the acceleration of P system simulation is often desired, given the computational needs derived from these kinds of models. One promising solution is to implement the inherent parallelism of P systems on platforms with parallel architectures.In this respect, GPU computing proved to be an alternative to more classic approaches in Parallel Computing. It provides a low cost, and a manycore platform with a high level of parallelism. The GPU has been already employed to speedup the simulation of P systems.In this paper, we look over the available parallel P systems simulators on the GPU, with special emphasis on those included in the PMCGPU project, and analyze some useful guidelines for future implementations and developments.

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Membrane Computing is a discipline aiming to abstract formal computing models, called membrane systems or P systems, from the structure and functioning of the living cells as well as from the cooperation of cells in tissues, organs, and other higher order structures. This framework provides polynomial time solutions to NP-complete problems by trading space for time, and whose efficient simulation poses challenges in three different aspects: an intrinsic massively parallelism of P systems, an exponential computational workspace, and a non-intensive floating point nature.In this paper, we analyze the simulation of a family of recognizer P systems with active membranes that solves the Satisfiability problem in linear time on different instances of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). For an efficient handling of the exponential workspace created by the P systems computation, we enable different data policies to increase memory bandwidth and exploit data locality through tiling and dynamic queues. Parallelism inherent to the target P system is also managed to demonstrate that GPUs offer a valid alternative for high-performance computing at a considerably lower cost. Furthermore, scalability is demonstrated on the way to the largest problem size we were able to run, and considering the new hardware generation from Nvidia, Fermi, for a total speed-up exceeding four orders of magnitude when running our simulations on the Tesla S2050 server.