Agent Architecture for Mesh Based Simulation Systems

The paper presents an analysis of requirements for building simulation systems with tightly coupled components, such as typical mesh based PDE approximation software. The considered systems are characterized as having high communication to computation ratio. When designing architectures for such systems the hardware and middleware capabilities for providing communication links between processes have to be investigated and fully exploited. This is the place where agent technology perfectly fits the requirements. In the whole system, the capabilities of agents should be complemented with less flexible but more efficient software organization. As an example a framework for finite element simulations, employing a modular architecture (described in [1]), is considered. Communication requirements for typical computations are estimated and evaluated in view of possible inter-process communication. The role of agents in setting up the execution structure of simulations is described.