  In this paper, we exhibit a strong relation between the sand automata
configuration space and the cellular automata configuration space. This
relation induces a compact topology for sand automata, and a new context in
which sand automata are homeomorphic to cellular automata acting on a specific
subshift. We show that the existing topological results for sand automata,
including the Hedlund-like representation theorem, still hold. In this context,
we give a characterization of the cellular automata which are sand automata,
and study some dynamical behaviors such as equicontinuity. Furthermore, we deal
with the nilpotency. We show that the classical definition is not meaningful
for sand automata. Then, we introduce a suitable new notion of nilpotency for
sand automata. Finally, we prove that this simple dynamical behavior is
undecidable.
