Nested Graphs: a model to efficiently distribute multi-agent systems on HPC clusters

in Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience (2017), 30(7), 22

Computational simulation is becoming increasingly important in numerous research fields. Depending on the modeled system, several methods such as differential equations or Monte-Carlo simulations may be ... [more ▼]

Computational simulation is becoming increasingly important in numerous research fields. Depending on the modeled system, several methods such as differential equations or Monte-Carlo simulations may be used to represent the system behavior. The amount of computation and memory needed to run a simulation depends on its size and precision and large simulations usually lead to long runs thus requiring to adapt the model to a parallel system. Complex systems are often simulated using Multi-agent systems (MAS). While linear system based models benefit from a large set of tools to take advantage of parallel resources, multi-agent systems suffer from a lack of platforms that ease the use of such resources. In this paper, we propose the use of Nested Graphs for a new modeling approach that allows the design of large, complex and multi-scale multi-agent models which can efficiently be distributed on parallel resources. Nested Graphs are formally defined and are illustrated on the well-known predator-prey model. We also introduce PDMAS (Parallel and Distributed Multi-Agent System) a platform that implements the Nested Graph modeling approach to ease the distribution of multi-agent models on High Performance Computing clusters. Performance results are presented to validate the efficiency of the resulting models. [less ▲]