The emergence of cellular computing

The von Neumann architecture-which is based upon the principle of one complex processor that sequentially performs a single complex task at a given moment-has dominated computing technology for the past 50 years. Recently however, researchers have begun exploring alternative computational systems based on entirely different principles. Although emerging from disparate domains, the work behind these systems shares a common computational philosophy, which the author calls cellular computing. This philosophy promises to provide new means for doing computation more efficiently-in terms of speed, cost, power dissipation, information storage, and solution quality. Simultaneously, cellular computing offers the potential of addressing much larger problem instances than previously possible, at least for some application domains. Cellular computing has attracted increasing research interest. Work in this field has produced results that hold prospects for a bright future. Yet questions must be answered before cellular computing can become a mainstream paradigm. What classes of computational tasks are most suited to it? How do we match the specific properties and behaviors of a given model to a suitable class of problems? At its heart, cellular computing consists of three principles: simplicity, vast parallelism, and locality