A high performance agent based modelling framework on graphics card hardware with CUDA

Abstract

We present an efficient implementation of a high performance parallel framework for Agent Based Modelling (ABM), exploiting the parallel architecture of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). It provides a mapping between formal agent specifications, with C based scripting, and optimised NVIDIA Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) code. The mapping of agent data structures and agent communication is described, and our work is evaluated through a number of simple interacting agent examples. In contrast with an alternative, single machine CPU implementation, a speedup of up to 250 times is reported.