Re: [Swarm-Modelling] Large scale ABM Simulation on the GPU

[Gary Polhill]

Interesting paper. One issue you haven't commented on in the paper is 
compliance of GPUs to IEEE 754 floating point arithmetic standards. My 
understanding is that GPUs tend to be non-compliant (see 
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~ibr/projects/paranoia/). I've written a couple of 
articles with my colleague Luis Izquierdo highlighting issues with 
floating-point in ABM. Though IEEE 754 doesn't solve these issues, I suspect 
non-compliance will make matters worse. This may only be important in 
activities such as statistics processing, rather than the other facilities you 
mention in your paper, but if even the storage of floating point numbers 
doesn't follow IEEE 754 format, then using the colour bands to store properties 
of agents and environments could also be risky...

Gary Polhill
Research Scientist
The Macaulay Institute
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>>> "Roshan D'Souza" <address@hidden> 2008-11-07 15:36 >>>
Hello all,

I just wanted to share my latest publication in JASSS on ABM simulation on
the GPU. In this paper, we describe a framework designed to execute in a
data-parallel mannner on graphics processing units that is upto 3 orders of
magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art simulation toolkits.

http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/11/4/10.html 

Regards,
Roshan M. D'Souza


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