An Agent-Based Simulation API for Speculative PDES Runtime Environments

Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation (ABMS) is an effective paradigm to model systems exhibiting complex interactions, also with the goal of studying the emergent behavior of these systems. While ABMS has been effectively used in many disciplines, many successful models are still run only sequentially. Relying on simple and easy-to-use languages such as NetLogo limits the possibility to benefit from more effective runtime paradigms, such as speculative Parallel Discrete Event Simulation (PDES). In this paper, we discuss a semantically-rich API allowing to implement Agent-Based Models in a simple and effective way. We also describe the critical points which should be taken into account to implement this API in a speculative PDES environment, to scale up simulations on distributed massively-parallel clusters. We present an experimental assessment showing how our proposal allows to implement complicated interactions with a reduced complexity, while delivering a non-negligible performance increase.