1. Introduction

Agent Based Modelling is a technique for the computational simulation of complex interacting systems through the specification of the behaviour of a number of autonomous individuals acting simultaneously. This is a bottom up approach, in contrast with the top down one of modelling the behaviour of the whole system through dynamic mathematical equations. The focus on individuals is considerably more computationally demanding, but provides a natural and flexible environment for studying systems demonstrating emergent behaviour. Despite the obvious parallelism, traditionally frameworks for ABM fail to exploit this and are often based on highly serialised algorithms for manipulating mobile discrete agents. Such an approach has serious implications, placing stringent limitations on both the scale of models and the speed at which they may be simulated. The purpose of the FLAME GPU framework is to address the limitations of previous agent modelling software by targeting the high performance GPU architecture. The framework is designed with parallelism in mind and as such allows agent models to scale to massive sizes and ensures simulations run within reasonable time constrains. In addition to this visualisation is easily achievable as simulation data is held entirely within GPU memory where it can be rendered directly.

1.1. High Level Overview of FLAME GPU

Technically the FLAME GPU framework is not a simulator, it is instead a template based simulation environment that maps formal descriptions of agents into simulation code. The representation of an agent is based on the concept of a communicating X-Machine (which is an extension to the Finite State Machine which includes memory). Whilst the X-Machine has very formal definition X-Machine agents can be thought of a state machines which are able to communicate via messages which are stored in a globally accessible message lists. Agent functionality is exposed as a set of state transition functions which move agents from one internal state to another. Upon changing state, agents update their internal memory through the influence of messages which may be either used as input (by iterating message lists) or as output (where information may be passed to the message lists for other agents to read). FLAME GPU uses agent function scripting for this purpose where script is defined in a number of Agent Function Files. Simulation models are specified using a format called X-Machine Mark-up Language (XMML) which is XML syntax with Schemas governing the content. A typically XMML model file consists of a definition of a number of X-Machine agents (including state and memory information as well as a set of agent transition functions), a number of message types (each of which has a globally accessible message list) and a set of simulation layers which define the execution order of agent functions (which constitutes a single simulation iteration). Throughout a simulation, agent data is persistent however message information (and in particular message lists) is persistent only over the lifecycle of a single iteration. This allows a mechanism for agents to iteratively interact in a way which allows emergent global group behaviour.

The process of generating a FLAME GPU simulation is described by the 1. The use of XML schemas forms a large part of the process where polymorphic like extension allows a base schema specification to be extended with a number of GPU specific elements. Given an XMML model definition, template driven code generation is achieved through Extensible Stylesheet Transformations (XSLT). XSLT is a flexible functional language based on XML (validated itself using a W3C specified Schema) and is suitable for the translation of XML documents into other document formats using a number of compliant processors (although the FLAME GPU SDK provides its own). Through the specification of a number of XSLT Simulation Templates a Dynamic Simulation API is generated which links with the Agent Function Files to generate a simulation program.

FLAME GPU Modelling and Simulation Processes

FLAME GPU Modelling and Simulation Processes

1.2. Purpose of This Document

The purpose of this document is to describe the functional parts which make up a FLAME GPU simulation as well as providing guidance on how to use the FLAME GPU SDK. describes in detail the syntax and format of the XMML Model file. describes the syntax of use of agent function scripts and how to use the dynamic simulation API and describes how to generate simulation code and run simulations from within the Visual Studio IDE. This document does not act as a review of background material relating to GPU agent modelling, nor does it provide details on FLAME GPUs implementation or descriptions of the FLAME GPU examples. For more in depth background material on agent based simulation on the GPU, the reader is directed towards the following document;

Richmond Paul, Walker Dawn, Coakley Simon, Romano Daniela (2010), “High Performance Cellular Level Agent-based Simulation with FLAME for the GPU”, Briefings in Bioinformatics, 11(3), pages 334-47.

For details on the implementation including algorithms and techniques the reader is directed towards the following publication;

Richmond Paul (2011), “Template Driven Agent Based Modelling and Simulation with CUDA”, GPU Computing Gems Emerald Edition (Wen-mei Hwu Editor), Morgan Kaufmann, March 2011, ISBN: 978-0-12-384988-5

Richmond Paul, Coakley Simon, Romano Daniela (2009), “A High Performance Agent Based Modelling Framework on Graphics Card Hardware with CUDA”, Proc. of 8th Int. Conf. on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2009), May, 10–15, 2009, Budapest, Hungary

Some examples of FLAME GPU models are described in the following publications;

Richmond Paul, Coakley Simon, Romano Daniela (2009), “Cellular Level Agent Based Modelling on the Graphics Processing Unit”, Proc. of HiBi09 - High Performance Computational Systems Biology, 14-16 October 2009,Trento, Italy (additional detail in the BiB paper)

Karmakharm Twin, Richmond Paul, Romano Daniela (2010), “ Agent-based Large Scale Simulation of Pedestrians With Adaptive Realistic Navigation Vector Fields”, To appear in Proc. of Theory and Practice of Computer Graphics (TPCG) 2010, 6-8th September 2010, Sheffield, UK