View article

In many domains, high-resolution agent-based simulations require experiments with a large number (tens or hundreds of millions) of computationally complex agents. Such large-scale experiments are usually run for efficiency on high-performance computers or clusters, and therefore agent-based simulation frameworks must support parallel distributed computations. The development of experiments with a large number of interconnected agents and a shared environment running in parallel on multiple compute nodes is especially challenging because it introduces the overhead of cross-process communications.

In this paper we discuss the parallel distributed architecture of the farm agent-based simulation framework for social network simulations. To address the issue of shared environment synchronization we used a hybrid approach that distributes the simulation environment across compute nodes and keeps …