John Conway’s cellular automaton, the Game of Life, has long been a staple project for those learning to code. It is also an “embarrassingly parallel” problem, making it a great learning tool for teaching ourselves how to parallelize processes using SYCL™. You will find that even the simplest parallel implementation of the Game of Life will yield a significant performance boost, however there are even more optimizations we can apply to squeeze as much performance out of our code.

One such optimization is the use of local memory.