J Supercomput (2014) 69:248–272 DOI 10.1007/s11227-014-1150-9 Evaluating the SAT problem on P systems for different high-performance architectures José M. Cecilia · José M. García · Ginés D. Guerrero · Manuel Ujaldón Published online: 19 March 2014 © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014 Abstract Membrane computing is an emergent research area studying the behav- ior of living cells to define bio-inspired computing devices, also called P systems. Such devices provide polynomial time solutions to NP-complete problems by trading time for space. The efficient simulation of P systems poses three major challenging issues: an intrinsic massive parallelism of P systems, an exponential computational workspace, and a non-intensive floating point nature. This paper analyzes the sim- ulation of a family of recognizer P systems with active membranes that solves the satisfiability problem in linear time on three different architectures: a shared memory multiprocessor, a distributed memory system, and a manycore graphics processing unit (GPU). For an efficient handling of the exponential workspace created by the P sys- tems computation, we enable different data policies on those architectures to increase memory bandwidth and exploit data locality through tiling. Parallelism inherent to the target P system is also managed on each architecture to demonstrate that GPUs offer a valid alternative for high-performance computing at a considerably lower cost. Our results lead to execution time improvements exceeding 310× and 78×, respectively, for a much cheaper high-performance alternative. J. M. Cecilia Computer Science Department, Universidad Católica San Antonio (UCAM), 30107 Murcia, Spain e-mail: jmcecilia@ucam.edu J. M. García Computer Engineering Department, University of Murcia, 30100 Murcia, Spain e-mail: jmgarcia@ditec.um.es G. D. Guerrero National Lab for High Performance Computing (NLHPC), Center for Mathematical Modeling (CMM), School of Engineering and Sciences, University of Chile, Santiago, Chile e-mail: gguerrero@nlhpc.cl M. Ujaldón (B ) Computer Architecture Department, University of Malaga, 29071 Malaga, Spain e-mail: ujaldon@uma.es 123