Extending SNP Systems Asynchronous Simulation Modes in P-Lingua

Abstract

Spiking neural P systems (SN P systems for short) is a developing field within the P systems world. Inspired by the neurophysiological structure of the brain, these systems have been subjected to many extensions in recent years, many of them intended to “somewhat” incorporate more and more features inspired by the functioning of the living neural cells. Although when first introduced in SN P systems were considered to work in synchronous mode, it became clear that considering nonsynchronized systems would be rather natural both from both from a mathematical and neuro-biological point of view. Asynchronous variants of these systems were introduced in, setting up a scenario where even if a neuron had enabled rules ready to fire, such rules non-deterministically could be not applied. Once new theoretical variants are defined, providing simulation software tools enables experimental study and validation of the proposed models. One more than promising developing branch comprises the use of parallel architectures, concretely GPUs, that provide efficient implementations. One drawback of this approach, due to the inherent constraints of the GPUs programming model, is a relatively long development cycle to extend existing variants. At the expense of sacrificing efficiency for expressivity, other alternatives involving sequential approaches can be considered. Within this trend, P–Lingua offers the high flexibility of the Java programming language as well as a general acceptance within the Membrane computing community. P–Lingua affords a standard language for the definition of P systems. Part of the same software project, pLinguaCore library provides particular implementations of parsers and simulators for the models specified in P–Lingua. Support for simulating SN P systems in P–Lingua was introduced in. In that version all (synchronous and asynchronous) “working modes” considered in were implemented. Since then, new asynchronous variants have appeared. In this paper we present a brand new extension of P–Lingua related to asynchronous SN P systems, in order to incorporate simulation capabilities for limited asynchronous SN P systems, introduced in, and asynchronous SN P systems with local introduced respectively in