The SDG Pheromone Volume 5, Issue 1

[Irene Lee]

                 The New Swarm Development Group Pheromone
                           Volume 5, Issue 1
                           February 10, 2000
 
 
    The Pheromone will stand to inform users of the activities and
 goals of the hive and user community.  Contributions are accepted that
 announce Swarm-related events or activities in any of the growing
 Swarm colonies around the world.  To contribute, send e-mail to
 <address@hidden> or <address@hidden>.  The Pheromone is mailed out if
 and only if there is information to be disseminated.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Welcome to the new Swarm Development Group Pheromone! (Same drones,
  different hive.) The Swarm Development Group has successfully split
  off from the Santa Fe Institute and is now fully recognized as a
  not-for-profit organization (501c3).  We have a business office at
  114 W. Lupita Road, Santa Fe, NM and software development offices at
  624 Agua Fria St. Santa Fe, NM.

  Change is good!  Read on for a full update.

Table of Contents

   I. Swarm's new home!

A. SDG news
B. New SDG members
C. New SDG directors
D. New look of swarm.org website. 
E. A Hive doesn't live on honey alone
F. Development news: Swarm version 2.1 to be released at Swarmfest 2000
G. Documentation news: Swarm User Guide update

  II. Swarmfest 2000 update! 

A. Conference CFP and registration 
B. Preliminary Program: talks and discussions
C. Top 5 reasons to attend Swarmfest 2000

 III. The rest of the buzz...  

A. Comings and goings 


========================================================================

   I. New home for Swarm
   ---------------------

   A. SDG news

  The Swarm Development Group has been recognized as a private,
not-for-profit organization whose goal is to continue the advancement
of the Swarm Simulation System and support of the Swarm user
community.  The tax-exempt status has been granted by the federal
government with effective starting date of September 2, 1999.  In
addition, the copyright of the Swarm Simulation System has been
transferred from the Santa Fe Institute to the Swarm Development
Group.

   B. New Swarm Development Group Members

  Thanks to Glen Ropella's call for the community support of the SDG
many individuals have joined the "Swarm".  They include:

     Evelyn Brannon
     Daniel Calhoun
     Catherine Dibble
     Paul Johnson
     Matthew Murphy
     Steve Railsback
     Rick Riolo
     Pietro Terna
     Sven Thommesen
     Dawn Trembath

  We would like to extend our thanks to the following groups for their 
generous support:

      Joint Warfare Analysis Center
        for their continuing support of Swarm software development.

      Santa Fe Institute
        for their donation of hardware and administrative support.

      Swarm Corporation
        for their donation of office space and equipment to 
        the Swarm Development Group.

  Finally, we would like to thank Nicholas Palevsky for his generous gift
to the Swarm Development Group!


  C.  New Swarm Development Group board members elected.

  At the Dec. 4th 1999 meeting of the Board of Directors of the SDG six new
directors were elected.  This brings the current board to eleven members.  
The new members are:

 Randy Burge,  (address@hidden)
 New Mexico Information Technology and Software Association (NMITSA)

 Roger Burkhart, (address@hidden)
 Vantage Point Systems

 Paul Johnson,  (address@hidden) 
 University of Kansas

 Nelson Minar, (address@hidden)

 Benedikt Stefansson, (address@hidden)
 CASA, Inc

 Sven Thommesen, (address@hidden)
 University of Auburn

Congratulations to the new board members. 


  D. Website migration to www.swarm.org

  Our thanks go out to Alex Lancaster for redesigning and implementing
the swarm.org website!

  http://www.swarm.org

Change your bookmarks please! 


  E. A hive doesn't live on honey alone...

We are actively seeking new members.  We are also asking to be
included in grants written by researchers using Swarm.

Targeted donations:

Twelve $500 donations to provide 1.5Meg SDSL (broadband Internet)
service to the SDG.

How to join: please contact Irene Lee at <address@hidden> for detailed
information concerning membership rates and benefits. Credit card
payments are now accepted!


  F. Swarm version 2.1 

Swarm 2.1 rounds out Java language support.  To make Swarm more
natural for Java programmers, the Swarm virtual machine can use Java
collections interchangeably with Swarm collections.  Swarm features
absent in 2.0.1 for Java users but present for Objective-C users have
been added, e.g., Swarm 2.1 has support for loading and saving
Java objects as HDF5 or Lisp.

For correctness and performance, Swarm 2.1 introduces interfaces for
describing language-specific, variable-argument, precisely-typed
actions as well as interfaces for tagging actions that apply across
sets of homogeneous agents.  Use of these interfaces gives Swarm the
information it needs to accelerate many kinds of common tasks. 
The Java layer for Swarm has been optimized in a number of ways, and
numerous bugs have been fixed.

Several users reported that the interface for saving objects via the
Archivers was cumbersome.  We've improved the Archivers so that
requests to save objects can be considered immediate, both for HDF5
and Lisp.  Along with this, the HDF5 support in R has been improved and
modularized and now supports Windows.

The SDG continues working toward making Swarm easy to install while
preserving the open sourceware spirit of the project.  For Windows
users, the Swarm 2.1 CD-ROM will ship with a InstallShield® package of
a self-contained and up-to-date GNU development environment configured
for Swarm, and a automated installer for GNU Emacs.  Emacs will come
preconfigured with JDE (a Java IDE), and multi-lingual editing
support.  (Kozo Keikaku Engineering has contributed a Japanese
translation of the Swarm documentation, but it is rapidly becoming
obsolete.  We need help maintaining this information!  The
multilingual Emacs support combined with a set of binaries on the
CD-ROM makes it possible to work on documentation in Windows with
minimal fuss.)

Finally, Swarm 2.1 will have more binary distributions than ever:
Solaris 2.[67] for Sparc, Debian 2.2 for Intel & Sparc, Redhat 6.1 for
Intel & Sparc, Suse 6.3 for Intel, and LinuxPPC 1999.  Swarm is known
to run on many more platforms, but we are limited by time and privileged
access to computers for making more.  Potential contributors:
this very useful and straightforward work!


  G. Documentation news: Swarm User Guide update

  The Swarm User Guide has gone from alpha to Beta status.  We hope to
have the first official SDG Beta release available before SwarmFest.
Thanks to Paul Johnson <address@hidden> (main text) and Alex
Lancaster <address@hidden> (additional text and SGML-smithing) for
their continuing efforts to bring the community a User Guide to Swarm.

The User Guide will contain some updated material formerly found in
the Reference Guide.  This will have the dual advantage of slimming
down the rather thick Reference Guide and making the updated material
available in a more appropriate context.


  II. SwarmFest 2000:  March 11th-13th 2000
  -----------------------------------------

  A.  Call For Participation

  The Swarm Development Group, in collaboration with the Utah State
University Department of Geography & Earth Resources, is pleased to
announce Swarmfest 2000, the fourth annual meeting of the Swarm User
Group.  SwarmFest 2000 will run from Saturday March 11th to Monday
13th, at the Utah State University Eccles Conference Center in Logan,
Utah.

Details and online registration are available at the conference website:

  http://www.ext.usu.edu/confer/swarmfest2000

Please contact either Irene Lee <address@hidden> or Dr. Paul Box at
Utah State <address@hidden> if you have additional questions.


  B.  Preliminary Program

  The preliminary Swarmfest 2000 program includes the following talks
and discussions:

 How To Write Fast Models in Swarm              
 Marcus Daniels, Swarm Development Group

 RePast: An Agent Based Simulation Framework    
 Nick Collier, University of Chicago, Social Science Research Center

 Ascape                                         
 Miles Parker, Brookings Institution

 Panel Discussion: Experiment Management        
 Steve Jackson, Paul Johnson, and Glen Ropella

 Getting Results: The Pattern-oriented Approach to Analyzing Complex
 Systems with Agent-based Models.
 Steve Railsback, Lang, Railsback & Associates

 The Robust Path to Parallelism
 Glen Ropella, Swarm Corporation

 Kenge: Swarm GIS-CA Libraries
 Paul Box and Akiko Ogawa, Utah State University

 Modeling Smolt Migration with Swarm            
 Jim Anderson and Nick Beer, University of Washington

 Stochastic Birth/Death Models as a Bridge between Differential Equation
 Models and Individual Based Models
 Doug Donalson, University of California, Santa Barbara

 Opinion Formation and the Resilience of Diversity
 Paul Johnson, University of Kansas


  C. Top 5 reasons to attend Swarmfest 2000

  1. rub shoulders with fellow Swarm users
  2. have your specific modeling needs heard and contribute to the setting 
     of future directions for Swarm
  3. learn how to write swarm.org into your research grant proposals
  4. learn how to speed up your code using the new 2.1 release
  5. hear the keynote address by Dr. Christopher Langton, founder of the 
     Swarm project.


 III. The rest of the buzz...
 ----------------------------

  A. Comings and goings...

  * Alex: Alex Lancaster is continuing at the Santa Fe Institute as a
resident programmer, whose duties include the construction and
software infrastructure for the planned 32 node SFI Beowulf cluster;
also developing parallel applications and toolkits to run on same, for
SFI researchers.

  * Marcus: Marcus Daniels will continue as a programmer with the
Swarm Development Group.

  * Irene: Irene Lee will continue as the President and Executive
Director of the Swarm Development Group.  Her current tasks include
finalizing the program for Swarmfest2000, writing grant proposals to
be submitted on behalf of the for Swarm Development Group, and
locating previously untapped sources of funding!

  * Matthew Murphy: Matthew Murphy of the University of Michigan
joined the hive for 3 weeks in January as a Student Intern.  During
his internship, Matt was primarily focused on developing a reflective
Swarm model in conjunction with MPI.

=====================================================================


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