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HLogo: A Haskell STM-Based Parallel Variant of NetLogo

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Simulation and Modeling Methodologies, Technologies and Applications (SIMULTECH 2016)

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 676))

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Abstract

Agent-based Modeling and Simulation (ABMS) has become a quite popular approach among researchers in the community, mainly due to its simplicity, expressiveness and wide applicability. However, in most cases, ABMS tools demonstrate reduced performance, especially when dealing with large experiments. This paper presents HLogo, a parallel variant of the NetLogo ABMS framework, that aims to increase the performance of simulations by utilizing Software Transactional Memory and multi-core CPUs, while maintaining the user friendliness of NetLogo. HLogo is implemented as a Domain Specific Language embedded in the functional language Haskell, which means that it also inherits Haskell’s features, such as strong static typing, a module system and a vast collection of programming libraries.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The actual definition of \(\mathtt{Monad}\) offers a slightly different and richer set of operations [26].

  2. 2.

    The actual symbol in Haskell is \(\mathtt{{<}\!\!{-}}\) instead of \(\leftarrow \). We use the later just for improving the presentation.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially funded by the EU project FP7-610582 ENVISAGE: Engineering Virtualized Services (http://envisage-project.eu). All the benchmarks in this work were carried out on the Dutch national HPC e-infrastructure, kindly provided by the SURF Foundation (http://surf.nl).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), P.O. Box 94079, 1090 GB, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Nikolaos Bezirgiannis

  2. Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, P.O. Box 80.089, 3508 TB, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    I. S. W. B. Prasetya

  3. Department of Applied Informatics, University of Macedonia, 156 Egnatia Street, 54636, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Ilias Sakellariou

Authors
  1. Nikolaos Bezirgiannis
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  2. I. S. W. B. Prasetya
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  3. Ilias Sakellariou
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Correspondence to Nikolaos Bezirgiannis .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. King Abdullah II School of Information Technology, The University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan

    Mohammad S. Obaidat

  2. School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

    Tuncer Ören

  3. Department of Modelling and Simulation, Riga Technical University, Riga, Latvia

    Yuri Merkuryev

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Bezirgiannis, N., Prasetya, I.S.W.B., Sakellariou, I. (2018). HLogo: A Haskell STM-Based Parallel Variant of NetLogo. In: Obaidat, M., Ören, T., Merkuryev, Y. (eds) Simulation and Modeling Methodologies, Technologies and Applications. SIMULTECH 2016. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 676. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69832-8_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69832-8_7

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