Synopsis

S. Bosse, Parallel and Distributed Agent-based Simulation of large-scale socio-technical Systems with loosely coupled Virtual Machines, Proc. of the SIMULTECH Conference 2021, International Conference on Simulation and Modeling Methodologies, Technologies and Applications, 7-9.7.2021, Online Paper PDF Presentation VIDEO Prsentation SLIDES Conference

Abstract

Agent-based systems are inherently distributed and parallel by a distributed memory model, but agent-based simulation is often characterised by a shared memory model. This paper discusses the challenges of and solution for large-scale distributed agent-based simulation using virtual machines. Simulation of large-scale multi-agent systems with more than 10000 agents on a single processor node requires high computational times that can be far beyond the constraints set by the users, e.g., in real-time capable simulations. Parallel and distributed simulation involves the transformation of shared to a communication-based distributed memory model that can create a significant communication overhead. In this work, instead distributing an originally monolithic simulator with visualisation, a loosely coupled distributed agent process platform cluster network performing the agent processing for simulation is monitored by a visualisation and simulation control service. A typical use case of traffic simulation in smart city context is used for evaluation the performance of the proposed DSEJAMON architecture.

Presentation