Abstract:

The platforms equipped with multi-core central processing units (CPU) and graphics processing units (GPU) provide more efficient hardware for improving the performance of parallel Agent-based simulations (PABS) on personal computers. In the correlative research field, there is currently lack of a general methodology that can take full advantage of the computing capability of multi-core CPUs and GPUs for PABS. By analyzing the characteristics of the heterogeneous architecture that consists of multi-core CPUs and GPUs, a multi-layer load distributing model for PABS on multi-core CPU and GPU platforms is built. According to the paradigm of Agent based simulations (ABS), the methods of rebuilding the computing and data structures of ABS are presented so as to adapt for the heterogeneous architecture. Finally a group of experiments are carried out for testing the performance of PABS on multi-core CPU and GPU platforms.