Re: [Swarm-Support] huge memory allocation

[Bill Northcott]

On 21/08/2004, at 3:14 AM, Rouilly, Vincent wrote:
> My question:
>
> For my perfect simulation, I would like to create a 5000x5000 Grid2d space + 3 Discrete2D planes.
>
> Within this space, I would like to insert up to 750000 agents .... (huge I know, and all as to be instantiated at the same time and for the same amount of time).
>
>  Of course I have memory allocation problems at the moment.
>
> How could I handle such a simulation ? Is there a way to increase the memory allocation capacity of Swarm (or my computer) ? Are they any limitations within swarm I should be aware of ? Using a cluster with Swarm is possible ?
Some more information would be helpful:
What is you current system?    - CPU/RAM/OS etc
How big can you go?  -  Does 500x500x3 with 75000 agents work?

That way you can see the scale of your problem.  My back of the envelope feel is that there is no way you will get all that in VM on a 32 bit machine.   Your talking 100 simultaneous HDTV displays with every pixel calculated!

Maybe it work on a 64 bit platform, but you might need truckloads of DRAM to stop the paging making everything horribly slow, and of course there is the small issue of cost.  It may still be horribly slow.

Otherwise, you try to box clever and see if you can break it into subproblems with looser coupling.  That is also what you would need to do to run on a cluster.  Swarm has no builtin cluster support, but maybe you could help add it.

Finally you just might have to lower your expectations.
Bill Northcott