Large scale agent-based simulation on the grid

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 can 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. The emergence of Grid technologies provides 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 middleware platform for executing large scale collaborating RePast agent-based models on the Grid. The paper also provides performance results from a deployment of the system between UK and Singapore. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.