A Survey on Parallel and Distributed Multi-Agent Systems

Simulation has become an indispensable tool for researchers to explore systems without having recourse to real experiments. Depending on the characteristics of the modeled system, methods used to represent the system may vary. Multi-agent systems are, thus, often used to model and simulate complex systems. Whatever modeling type used, increasing the size and the precision of the model increases the amount of computation, requiring the use of parallel systems when it becomes too large. In this paper, we focus on parallel platforms that support multi-agent simulations. Our contribution is a survey on existing platforms and their evaluation in the context of high performance computing. We present a qualitative analysis, mainly based on platform properties, then a performance comparison using the same agent model implemented on each platform.