Design of a Hardware Architecture Based on Microcontrollers for the Implementation of Membrane Systems

The nature of the computation based on membranes, distributed, nondeterministic and massively parallel makes that the current hardware architectures, mainly based in the use of clusters of microprocessors, be not the most appropriate to house this type of systems; especially if we think about the associated costs to solutions that try to maximize the grade of potential parallelism. The use of microcontroller, in these cases, it could be considered like a viable alternative, by its low cost and its high processing capacity, of not being because its use is restricted to problems that can be adapted to the small amount of memory that this kind of devices has to store generic data. The present work describes in a exhaustive way the implementation of a low cost hardware prototype based on microcontrollers that making use of external memory modules is able to resolve the main problem of the small capacity of storage of these components. This way range of approachable problems is enlarged and its use becomes a real alternative to the solutions based on clusters of microprocessors. The adopted hardware architecture also endows from a great flexibility to the proposed solution, since, unlike others, it doesn't require modifications to adapt to anyone of the topologies of current membrane systems. It will be responsibility of the software component that we use, the implementation of the algorithms that reproduce the behavior of different membrane systems