GPUPeP: Parallel Enzymatic Numerical P System simulator with a Python-based interface

Membrane computing is a computational paradigm inspired by the structure and behavior of a living cell. P Systems are the computing devices that are used to realize membrane computing models. Numerous theoretical studies on many variants of P Systems have shown them to be computationally universal. There is a wide range of applications of P Systems from modeling of biological processes to image processing. Among many variants of P Systems, one of the most important is Enzymatic Numerical P System (ENPS). ENPS is a class of P System in which membranes operate on numerical values. To realize the power of ENPS there are a few simulators developed. Each and every simulator has some advantages as well as some disadvantages. Here, a GPU based simulator using Python as a user interaction language is developed. This tool is a completely parallel variant, compatible with a Python based sequential simulator (PeP) which was the first Python based work for ENPS. The developed simulator uses CUDA to interact with GPU and gives the desired speed up, while processing the membranes. There are two important case studies which show the performance of the developed tool to be far better than the other serial simulators.