Re: Distributed Swarm in Java

[Marcus G. Daniels]

>>>>> "JJ" == Jules X Junker <address@hidden> writes:

JJ> I want these simulations to be all in the same time-step.

Sure, look at simpleSwarmBug in the tutorial in swarmapps-2.1, or heatbugs.

JJ> Is there any support in Swarm for this kind of thing?

It's a question of how many Swarms and Schedules you have.  If I understand
what you want, it's one Schedule in one Swarm.

JJ> Has anyone else implemented any Java based, distributed swarms.
JJ> Can you give me an idea of how to approach this?

Do you expect parts of the simulation will be complex, opaque, and
expensive to step forward in time, and further do they need to update
their modifications to the landscape before anything else can proceed?
If so, you could use asynchronous RPC calls to call methods in a cross
machine fashion.  The method would call, return immediately, and then lock
some resource when it had to write back changes (perhaps several times).

Swarm has data structures that track logically concurrent events, but
there is nothing implemented to run those event lists in parallel.  To
make that work, someone would need to add a thread queue to Swarm that
could quickly call the list of pending concurrent actions.  One
complication would be that access to variables would need to be
mediated by locks, or at least the modeler would have well understand
how data could be mutated..

The Swarm projct never really had the resources to devote to this..

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