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Cosmos uses a distributed memory model of parallelism,
in contrast to the shared memory model of Parallel Tierra. In other
words, each cell in a multicellular organism in Cosmos has its own
copy of the program code, of the other cellular structures, and of the
CPU state information (registers, instruction pointer, etc.). This
distributed memory model, together with the Cosmos regulator system,
should promote the emergence of differentiation in parallel
programs. However, little work has so far been conducted with parallel
programs in Cosmos, so it is not yet known how effective this approach
really is.
Tim Taylor
1999-05-29