Re: [Swarm-Modelling] ABMs on Graphical Processor Units

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Russell Standish wrote:
> The blocks need to be implementable in SIMD hardware, which pretty
> much rules out the sort of higher level functionality you're talking
> about. 
Not really, the Cell SDK has a complete GCC target (e.g. working 
Objective C and C++) for both the front end (PPU) and back end (SPU) 
processors.  As far as RPC infrastructure goes, it happens that when a C 
routine is called on a SPU for a Unix system call, that system call is 
actually a RPC back to the PPU.   Unfortunately, OpenMP in GCC (gomp) 
doesn't work out of the box because there are two different instruction 
sets (one 64 bit for the PPU) and (32 bit for the SPU).  But there's a 
low level library for messaging (libspe) and even a IDL stubber for 
higher level stuff:

http://moss.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/idl.pdf

Of course, additional runtime support would be needed to implement the 
idea I mentioned, but it's not like it is necessary to use only assembly 
or compiler intrinsics to get off the ground.  Even NVidia GPUs now have 
a C-like language (CUDA).

> Other possibilities include artificial neural networks,
> or fuzzy logic inference engines that could be used to implement agent
> behaviour.
>   
I was thinking some kind of optimization package would make a lot of 
sense for GPUs or the Cell.  Any kind of procedure that had lots of 
candidates at once -- like a genetic program or a parallel tempering 
procedure.

Marcus