CxC and Grid Wars

By Martin Heller

February 17, 2003

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Effective parallel computing has, over the years, been one of the "holy grails" of the computer science community. There have been lots of approaches tried, both in hardware (think Connection Machine, for example) and in software (think Linda,Erlang, and Jini/JavaSpaces). Since BYTE.com's Spring 2002 special issue on distributed computing covered a lot of that, I won't belabor the history here. I'll just mention the availability of the open source Cactus project, a modular problem-solving environment for parallel computations aimed primarily at scientists and engineers, and of the Globus Toolkit, which implements the Open Grid Services Architecture.

Engineered Intelligence Corporation and co-sponsor HP recently announced a parallel computing competition called Grid Wars, organized to promote EI's CxC (pronounced "C by C") parallel programming language and HP's Itanium cluster servers.

At first glance, Grid Wars reminded me of Microsoft's .NET Terrarium game, and even more, of the old Core Wars game. I asked Matt Oberdorfer, President of EI, what it's all about.

Oberdorfer:

We didn't have Core Wars in mind when we came up with the Grid Wars competition, and we actually didn't even know about that until later, when people started asking us about it. In Core Wars, a number of assembly programs try to overwrite each other in memory, and the one who takes over all of memory wins.

Grid Wars is more like a game of Go played with cellular automata—maybe like a competitive form of Conway's game of Life. We define a 50 by 30 grid of nodes, and each warrior has 3 bullets it can use per turn.

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