Re: Compare Swarm with Repast

[Gary Polhill]

>Gulyas Laszlo writes:
> > > Problems with Java.
> > >
> > > 1) Its slow
> > 
> > OK. Compared to, exactly what? It's much slower than
> > C, of course, but I am not sure about Objective-C (with
> > TCL/TK, JavaSwarm, etc.). Especially not on a Windows
> > computer that acutally has to emulate Unix to start it up.
>
>Actually, I doubt that it's much slower than Objective-C, if at all.
>

Just to chime in here, we did a test of the RePast Heatbugs, the JavaSwarm 
Heatbugs and the (Obj-C) Swarm Heatbugs (on a Sun Blade 1000), and found the 
Obj-C Swarm heatbugs fastest, the JavaSwarm heatbugs slightly slower, and the 
RePast heatbugs almost an order of magnitude slower. (For example, in one 
minute, RePast runs 296 cycles of heatbugs, JavaSwarm 1760 cycles, and Swarm 
2017.)

Speed is an issue for us, but we wanted to move to Java because it's a more 
standard language (though personally I prefer Obj-C by a long way). I'd have 
accepted a small performance hit from using Java, but figured if heatbugs was 
so slow in RePast in comparison with (Java)Swarm then there wasn't much hope 
for our model.

Of course, it may be that there was some systematic bias in the way the test 
was done, and if anyone can tell me how I should do it fairly (other than just 
running each app when there are no other users on the system and taking 
timings) I'd be happy to post the results.

Gary



Gary Polhill
Research Scientist
The Macaulay Institute
Craigiebuckler
Aberdeen AB15 8QH
UK
Tel: +(44) (0)1224 498200 Ext 2238
Fax: +(44) (0)1224 311556
e-mail: address@hidden
http://www.macaulay.ac.uk/
http://www.macaulay.ac.uk/fearlus/



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