Re: [Swarm-Modelling] SWARM on Clusters

[gepr]

The issue is:  What do people do with Swarm and what do they _want_ to
do with it that they currently can't or find hard?

A coarse-grained parallelism is reasonable and you'll see an almost
linear speedup using it.  For example, if you have a model that you
have to run 10 times to explore the model's parameter space, then 
having a 10-node cluster makes that effort almost 10 times as fast.

Forget the fine-grained stuff like managing event lists and think
asynchronous monte-carlo.  After all, if you wanted a system for doing
"real" parallel computation, you wouldn't be using a prototyping tool
like Swarm, anyway.

If the conversation about "start small and move steadily forward" 
means anything, it's referring to things like this.

Assuming we had infrastructure for passing whole simulations out
(grid-like) to many different nodes, then we could begin talking
about where to cut the scheduling mechanism to make multiple, 
mostly unrelated, swarms talk to each other.

Andy Cleary writes:
 > You just can't do any reasonable level of parallelism without taking a more 
 > explicit "partitioned/domain decomposed" approach, and for that a new 
 > generation of ABM infrastructure is needed...

It's true that you have to [de]compose things at the domain level.
But, I don't think it's true that you need a whole new infrastructure.
It's more likely that all we need is a new piece of infrastructure.

Perhaps as we develop ABM patterns, some attempts could be made to
describe this new piece so that we can begin building it.

-- 
glen e. p. ropella              =><=                           Hail Eris!
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