[Swarm-Modelling] ABMs on Graphical Processor Units

[Steve Railsback]

Roshan D'Souza of Michigan Tech asked me to post this announcement about his 
recent success programming ABMs in Graphical Processor Units (the highly 
parallel, inexpensive gaming processors). He writes:

"To test our system, we implemented SugarScape, a simple model with many common 
ABM features. We are able to achieve over 50 updates per second with agent 
populations exceeding 2 million on an environment with a resolution of 2560x1024 
with visualization."

and:

"our system can run 4 orders of magnitude faster than Ecolab on large versions 
(2 million + agents) of test case ABMs"

There is a paper on this work on the wiki at:
http://www.swarm.org/wiki/Tools_for_Agent-Based_Modelling#Related_tools_and_technologies

Also see Dr. D'Souza's page: http://www.me.mtu.edu/%7Ermdsouza/ABM_GPU.html

Steve Railsback