Exploiting GPU computing for effective Agent-Based simulation: initial experiments

Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation (ABMS) has been increasingly applied in various research fields, thanks to the capability of these models to describe fine-grained realworld behavior and to the ease of interpretation by domain experts. However, such models lack a formal definition and well-defined semantics that are common to the different tools supporting ABMS. This may occasionally lead to greater complexity in interpreting the results with respect to other modeling approaches. To address this issue, an ABM semantics that adopts a continuous-time approach and a next-event time advance simulation algorithm has been formally defined and presented. Such an approach may lead to high computation times as it requires recalculations of activity rates for all the agents after each event. In this preliminary study, we exploit the FLAME GPU framework to evaluate the benefits that GPU computing may bring to the performance of our simulation algorithm.