Title
Parallelization Strategies for Spatial Agent-Based Models
Date Issued
01 June 2017
Access level
open access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Universidad de las Fuerzas Armadas-ESPE
Publisher(s)
Springer New York LLC
Abstract
Agent-based modeling (ABM) is a bottom-up modeling approach, where each entity of the system being modeled is uniquely represented as an independent decision-making agent. Large scale emergent behavior in ABMs is population sensitive. As such, the number of agents in a simulation should be able to reflect the reality of the system being modeled, which can be in the order of millions or billions of individuals in certain domains. A natural solution to reach acceptable scalability in commodity multi-core processors consists of decomposing models such that each component can be independently processed by a different thread in a concurrent manner. In this paper we present a multithreaded Java implementation of the PPHPC ABM, with two goals in mind: (1) compare the performance of this implementation with an existing NetLogo implementation; and, (2) study how different parallelization strategies impact simulation performance on a shared memory architecture. Results show that: (1) model parallelization can yield considerable performance gains; (2) distinct parallelization strategies offer specific trade-offs in terms of performance and simulation reproducibility; and, (3) PPHPC is a valid reference model for comparing distinct implementations or parallelization strategies, from both performance and statistical accuracy perspectives.
Start page
449
End page
481
Volume
45
Issue
3
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Ciencias de la computación
Subjects
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-84954555547
Source
International Journal of Parallel Programming
ISSN of the container
08857458
Source funding
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia
Sponsor(s)
This work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) projects UID/EEA/50009/2013, UID/MAT/04561/2013 and (P. RD0389) Incentivo/EEI/LA0009/2014, and partially funded with Grant SFRH/BD/48310/2008, also from FCT. The author Vitor V. Lopes acknowledges the financial support from the Prometeo project of SENESCYT (Ecuador).
Sources of information:
Directorio de Producción Científica
Scopus