CAM8: a Parallel, Uniform, Scalable Architecture for Cellular Automata Experimentation

The Official CAM8 Brochure

ARPA Project Summary

There is a SunOS device driver for the SBus interface card that connects CAM8 to the workstation. The device driver has been tested with both sun4c and sun4m architecture machines.

We have written an X-Windows utility, called XCAM , that allows users to display the VGA output from CAM8 in a window on the host workstation. It is based on the popular TCL interpreter and TK Motif-like widget toolkit. XCAM allows users to capture images and save them to disk in Portable Pixmap (PPM) format or Postscript format. We use the PBMPLUS toolkit to provide this functionality. XCAM also has the ability to dump an image directly to the XV program for further processing and saving in a number of popular formats. We plan to use PPM as our basic format and provide a program for converting between PPM and pattern files (the native image format for CAM8).

We are in the process of creating a library of C routines that will be used to program CAM8. A library of routines (StepLib) for low-level control of the CAM8 hardware is almost complete. When finished this library will form the basis of a C programming environment for CAM8. It will also allow us to use other extendable or embedable public domain interpreters. Currently the publicly released version of the library consists only of the PipeComm communication package. We use as PipeComm a basis for communication between the STEP software and external utlities (such as XCAM). PipeComm uses UNIX pipes for a two-way, handshaking communication channel where the external program acts as a recipient of requests from the STEP software. This package will be extended to use Berkley UNIX sockets and improved so that it can be used as a generalized communication protocol in the CAM8 programming environment.