Partitioning large-scale artificial society on distributed cluster with statistical movement graph

Abstract

ABSTRACTDistributed agent-based simulation is a popular method to realize computational experiment on large-scale artificial society. Meanwhile, the partitioning strategy of the artificial society models among hosts is playing an essential role for simulation engine to offer high execution efficiency as it has great impact on the communication overheads and computational load-balancing during simulation. Aiming at the problem, we firstly analyze the execution and scheduling process of agents during simulation and model it as wide-sense cyclostationary random process. Then, a static statistical partitioning model is proposed to obtain the optimal partitioning strategy with minimum average communication cost and load imbalance factor. To solve the static statistical partitioning model, this paper turns it into a graph-partitioning problem. A statistical movement graph-based partitioning algorithm is then devised which generates task graph model by mining the statistical movement information from initialization data of simulation model. In the experiments, two other popular partitioning methods are used to evaluate the performance of proposed graph-partitioning algorithm. Furthermore, this paper compares the graph-partitioning performance under different task graph model. The results indicate that our proposed statistical movement graph-based static partitioning method outperforms all other methods in reducing the communication overhead while satisfying the load balance constraint.