Parallel Implementation

In this stage, you are required to write code to evolve Game of Life using multiple worker goroutines on a single machine.

The following pages are some suggested steps to help you get started, you are not required to follow them.

Your implementation will be marked against the success criteria outlined here.

Step 1

Implement the Game of Life logic as it was described in the task introduction.

We suggest starting with a single-threaded implementation that will serve as a starting point in subsequent steps.

Your Game of Life should evolve for the number of turns specified in gol.Params.Turns. Your Game of Life should evolve the correct image specified by gol.Params.ImageWidth and gol.Params.ImageHeight.

The skeleton code starts three goroutines. The diagram below shows how they should interact with each other.

Note that not all channels linking IO and the Distributor have been initialised for you. You will need to make them and add them to the distributorChannels and ioChannels structs. These structs are created in gol/gol.go.

Step 1

IO

You are not able to call methods directly on the IO goroutine. To use the IO, you will need to utilise channel communication.
To read the initial PGM image, you will need the command, filename and input channels. Look at the file gol/io.go for their implementation details.
The functions io.readPgmImage and startIo are particularly important in this step.

Events

Your Game of Life code will interact with the user or the unit tests using the events channel. All events are defined in the file gol/event.go. In this step, you will only be working with the unit test TestGol. Therefore, you only need to send the FinalTurnComplete event, with the list of alive cells.

Test

To test your serial, single-threaded implementation, type the following in the terminal, all the tests ran should pass.

bash

go test -v -run TestGol/-1$

Troubleshooting

If the zero turn tests pass, then you are reading the input file correctly and are giving the right list of alive cells in FinalTurnComplete.

If they fail, check your input and FinalTurnComplete logic before you start debugging your Game of Life turn logic.