Re: [Swarm-Modelling] Question about Distributed Simulations

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Hi Gary,
> I am looking into the feasibility of running a Swarm simulation on 
> IBM's Blue Gene L, which has as its base rack a 1000 node cluster 
> (2000 PPC 5 processors). The question is whether an individual run 
> could be done across the entire cluster, with groups of agents 
> distributed among all the nodes and communication across the nodes
One way you could think about doing this is to have all of the nodes of 
the cluster read and write via a fast shared parallel database such as 
HDF5.   Swarm has the basic support for reading and writing objects via 
HDF5.  To have a 2d space, for example, would mean making the `moves' be 
updates via a key (an x,y coordinate).  There's isn't a builtin class to 
do it for you, but it wouldn't be hard to write.

http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/hdf5-quest.html#phdf5

As HDF5 was developed with DOE/ASCI funding, it is probably already 
installed on the Livermore machine..

In parallel programming, this approach is sometimes called a "Tuple 
space". 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple_space
http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/dbpp/text/node44.html

Marcus