Hey PY! It's been a long time!
I'd chuck the old C++ version, except maybe to see how I approached some things. For better or worse it inherits a lot of the sins of the VB6 version and I was a fairly green engineer at the time. There's a lot I'd do differently.
For an environment grid I'd ditch object oriented entirely and do a functional style. Essentially several flat 2D arrays of scalars with some kernels to apply to them. I feel that's more likely to be both testable and performant.
This talk is python-centric but about doing Conway's game of life in an object oriented way and why that might not be the best way to do it. Might give you some food for thought.
It probably just makes sense to host code on github (assuming you want to open source it) but you're welcome to any server resources you'd like. The server is just running linux where we have (essentially) root access.
When I find free time I still try to work on DB3 but I'm happy to put together a few CLs for your project if there's anything well defined you'd like to farm out.