A survey on parallel and distributed multi-agent systems for high performance computing simulations

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 often used to model and simulate complex systems. In any cases, 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 and their execution on high performance resources as parallel clusters. Our contribution is a survey on existing platforms and their evaluation in the context of high performance computing. We present a qualitative analysis of several multi-agent platforms, their tests in high performance computing execution environments, and the performance results for the only two platforms that fulfill the high performance computing constraints. •We survey Parallel and Distributed Multi-Agents Systems for HPC.•We analyze the platform properties for distribution support.•We have implemented a reference model to assess the impact of the properties on the simulation development.•We assess the performance impact on the simulation scalability.