Sébastien Tripodi, Pascal Ballet and Vincent Rodin.
GPU implementation and performance analysis of reactive agents having
division and mobility capacities.
Multiagent and Grid Systems, IOS Press, 8(4):289-309, December 2012.
Abstract:
Nowadays the basic graphic cards contain more than 300 compute cores, which is
expected to significantly increase the performances of parallel applications.
In the past few years, several works were made concerning the simulation of
Multi-agent Systems on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). But they often use
agents which have a position in the environment associated with an interaction
radius. In this study we present a generic implementation on the GPU of
reactive agents, which are formed of a set of positions. The communications
between the agents are only indirect, and are possible by reading the trail
left by other agents. In our system these trails diffuse in the environment.
The problem posed is to compute the diffusion in an efficient way, otherwise
the whole environment should be iterated. Our implementation takes advantage
of the GPU by executing each agent and diffusion on one compute unit. Firstly,
our implementation keeps the same dynamics in comparison to previous studies,
where the agents were not executed in parallel. Secondly, the simulation time
has a 45 X speed advantage over a 4 core CPU.
Keywords:
Parallel programming, GPU, Reactive agent, Emergent behavior, Morphogenesis.
[doi:10.3233/MGS-120196]
[Tripodi12a.pdf]