Cellato

Cellato is a C++20 library and embedded DSL for cellular automata. It lets you describe an automaton rule as a type-level C++ expression, then run that same rule through different evaluators, memory layouts, and traversers.

The library is designed around separation of concerns:

Component	Role
Algorithm	Cellular automaton rule written with the DSL.
Evaluator	Per-cell or per-word rule evaluation.
Layout	Memory representation such as standard cells, bit arrays, or bit planes.
Traverser	CPU or CUDA execution strategy.

This keeps rule definitions independent from performance-oriented choices like packed state storage, bit-plane vectorization, CUDA traversal, and temporal blocking.

Documentation

Start with docs/README.md. The documentation covers:

• getting started with the CMake build and CLI;
• defining a custom automaton in examples/your_own_ca;
• the DSL nodes and bundled automata;
• layout, evaluator, traverser, and CUDA instantiation details;
• performance guidance for bit arrays, bit planes, tiled bit planes, and temporal blocking.

Build

Configure and build the default release profile:

cmake --preset release
cmake --build --preset release --parallel 4

Run unit tests:

ctest --preset release

Verification and benchmark builds use separate build directories:

cmake --preset verification
cmake --build --preset verification --parallel 4
ctest --preset verification

cmake --preset benchmark
cmake --build --preset benchmark --parallel 4

CLI Example

build/release/cellato \
  --automaton game-of-life \
  --device CPU \
  --traverser simple \
  --evaluator standard \
  --layout standard \
  --x_size 8 \
  --y_size 8 \
  --rounds 1 \
  --warmup_rounds 0 \
  --steps 2 \
  --seed 1

This runs the Game of Life automaton on a CPU with a simple traverser, standard evaluator, and standard layout (equivalent to a standard 2D array of cells). The program should end quickly and print a report of the run, producing checksum values 0-0-0-0-0-0-1-0-0-3-1-1-2-0-0-0.

Make Your Own Automaton

The examples/your_own_ca directory contains a small application using the Cellato DSL to implement and run a custom cellular automaton.

cmake --preset release -S examples/your_own_ca
cmake --build examples/your_own_ca/build/release --parallel 4
examples/your_own_ca/build/release/your_own_ca

Publications

Cellato is developed from the ideas in the Cellato DSL paper and the follow-up bit-plane/vectorization work:

• Cellato: a DSL for Cellular Automata based on C++ Template Meta-programming

  • Journal of Object Technology, 2026.
  • DOI: 10.5381/jot.2026.25.1.a13
  • Artifact: matyas-brabec/2025-icooolps-cellato

  Cite as: Matyáš Brabec, Jiří Klepl, Martin Kruliš, “Cellato: a DSL for Cellular Automata based on C++ Template Meta-programming”, Journal of Object Technology, Volume 25, no. 1 ( 2026), pp. 1:1-13, doi:10.5381/jot.2026.25.1.a13.

  BibTeX entry for citation:

  @article{
    title = {Cellato: a DSL for Cellular Automata based on C++ Template Meta-programming},
    author = {Matyáš Brabec and Jiří Klepl and Martin Kruliš},
    journal = {Journal of Object Technology},
    volume = {25},
    number = {1},
    issn = {1660-1769},
    year = {2026},
    month = mar,
    pages = {1:1-13},
    doi = {10.5381/jot.2026.25.1.a13},
    url = {https://www.jot.fm/contents/issue_2026_01/a13.html},
    note = {ECOOP 2025 Workshops}
  }

• Improving Cellular Automata Performance with Bit-Planes Encoding and Bitwise Vectorization

  • In peer-review for the Parallel Computing journal
  • Artifact: matyas-brabec/2026-cellato-journal

If you use Cellato in research, please cite the most recent published paper.

The linked artifacts preserve the paper-specific replication packages with past versions of Cellato.

License

Cellato is released under the MIT License.