Programming Agent-Based Demographic Models with Cross-State and Message-Exchange Dependencies: A Study with Speculative PDES and Automatic Load-Sharing
Alessandro Pellegrini, Cristina Montañola-Sales, Francesco Quaglia, and Josep Casanovas-Garcia
Published in: Proceedings of the 2016 Winter Simulation Conference
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Abstract:
Agent-based modeling and simulation is a versatile and promising methodology to capture complex interactions among entities and their surrounding environment. A great advantage is its ability to model phenomena at a macro scale by exploiting simpler descriptions at a micro level. It has been proven effective in many fields, and it is rapidly becoming a de-facto standard in the study of population dynamics. In this article we study programmability and performance aspects of the last-generation ROOT-Sim speculative PDES environment for multi/many-core shared-memory architectures. ROOT-Sim transparently offers a programming model where interactions can be based on both explicit message passing and in-place state accesses. We introduce programming guidelines for systematic exploitation of these facilities in agent-based simulations, and we study the effects on performance of an innovative load-sharing policy targeting these types of dependencies. An experimental assessment with synthetic and real-world applications is provided, to assess the validity of our proposal.
BibTeX Entry:
author = {Pellegrini, Alessandro and Montañola-Sales, Cristina and Quaglia, Francesco and Casanovas-Garcia, Josep},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2016 Winter Simulation Conference},
title = {Programming Agent-Based Demographic Models with Cross-State and Message-Exchange Dependencies: A Study with Speculative PDES and Automatic Load-Sharing},
year = {2016},
month = dec,
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
series = {WSC},
location = {Washington, D.C., USA}
}