ENHANCING THE PERFORMANCES OF D-MASON:A MOTIVATING EXAMPLE

Agent-based simulation models are an increasingly popular tool for research and management in many, different and diverse fields. In executing such simulations the “speed” is one of the most general and important issues and the traditional answer to this issue is to invest resources in deploying a dedicated installation of dedicated computers, with highly specialized parallel applications, devoted to the purpose of achieving extreme computational performances. In this paper we present our experience with a distributed framework, D-MASON, that is a distributed version of MASON, a well-known and popular library for writing and running Agent-based simulations. D-MASON introduces the parallelization at framework level so that scientists that use the framework (domain expert but with limited knowledge of distributed programming) can be only minimally aware of such distribution. The framework allowed only a static decomposition of the work among workers, and was not able to cope with load unbalance among them, therefore incurring in serious performance degradation where, for example, many of the agents were concentrate on one specific part of the space. We elaborated two strategies for ameliorate the balancing and enhance the synchronization among workers. We present their design principles and the experimental tests that validate our approach.