A High-Performance Open Testbed for Multi-Agent Systems

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

This project will create a sharable scientific infrastructure for experimental research on large-scale, large-grain multi-agent software systems (MAS). The research will extend the capabilities of an existing lightweight, flexible, integrative, and scalable experimental platform called MACE3J. Building on the current prototype, additional functionality will be designed into MACE3J, and several modeling/analysis component libraries will be added. The resulting infrastructure will be tested for robustness and scalability on small-to-large-scale multicomputer platforms using a suite of example MAS problems. The tools and documentation produced by the research will be widely distributed as a community research base. Outcomes will include: 1) a facility for collaboration and model/data integration within the MAS research community; 2) a technology that will begin unifying MAS community efforts with ongoing high-performance computing research in areas such as single-system-image clustering, very large, distributed computational grids, highly heterogeneous high-performance codes, and the use of Java for high-performance computing; 3) tools for education and demonstration of multi-agent systems research and results; and 4) foundations for common benchmark problems, to provide comparability of results and to help measure general progress in the field of MAS.