Grid-aware Large Scale Distributed Simulation of Agent-based Systems

The development of many complex simulation applications requires collaborative effort from researchers with different domain knowledge and expertise, possibly at different locations. These simulation systems often require huge computing resources and data sets, which may be geographically distributed. In order to support collaborative model development and to cater for the increasing complexity of such systems, it is necessary to harness distributed resources over the Internet. While the High Level Architecture (HLA) enables interoperability, it does not provide support for collaborative development of simulation applications, nor does it provide any mechanism for managing the resources where the simulation is being executed. The emergence of Grid technologies provide exciting new opportunities for large scale distributed simulation, enabling collaboration and the use of distributed computing resources, while also facilitating access to geographically distributed data sets. This paper presents HLA GRID REPAST, a system for executing large scale distributed simulations of agent based systems over the Grid. Performance results in LAN and WAN environments are also presented.