[Swarm-Support] Re: swarm software

[Alex Lancaster]

>>>>> "Lee" == Lee Wen Chian Civ AFIT/ENG  writes:

Lee> Hello, I am a student working on a swarm-related project.  I
Lee> found your swarm software, but it's hard for me to discuss its
Lee> functionalities with fellow students due to the lack of tutorial
Lee> and documentation.  I have a few questions about the software.
Lee> They are mostly high-leveled question; since software packages
Lee> vary widely, if any question is not applicable or there're
Lee> specific noteworthy features to this swarm, please let me know.

[Q&A at end of mail]

Lee> Thank you in advance for your time.

Hi Lee,

There is tutorial and documentation support, but you must not have
looked at the Swarm website (how did you find our project?):

 http://www.swarm.org/

in particular:

 http://www.swarm.org/release-docs.html
 http://www.swarm.org/intro-tutorial.html

also look at the FAQ:

http://www.ku.edu/~pauljohn/SwarmFaq/SwarmOnlineFaq.html

The best place to ask your questions is on the Swarm support and
Swarm modelling mailing lists:

 http://www.swarm.org/mailman/listinfo/support
 http://www.swarm.org/mailman/listinfo/modelling

for details of how to subscribe and to look at archives.  (I have
Cc'ed your e-mail to Swarm support and all followups should be done
via that list, so others can benefit from answers to your questions).

Lee> 1. What's the interactive control environment (text based, GUI...)?

Both: both batch-mode & GUI are available

Lee> 2. What's the UAV model and sensor model used(if any)?

I'm not familar with this acronym, Swarm is for agent-based modelling.

Lee> 3. How is the meta level network architecture described (is it an
Lee> adjustable parameter)?

Lee> 4. What software (if any) is needed to analyze the results?

Output can be sent via HDF5 and read by R (open-source SPlus) or any
other standard packages.

Lee> 5. How are the result statistics represented?

Graphs, widgets, output to a file, either in text or binary (see docs
and tutorial.

Lee> 6. Is the execution time included as part of the output? 

On Unix-like systems simply use "time".

Lee> 7. What's the underlying operating system?

Various Linux flavours, Windows, and a Mac OS X port is underway,
Swarm has worked under Solaris, Irix, HP/UX in the past, although more
effort may required to get it to work on those platforms.  See:

 http://www.swarm.org/release-swarm-snapshot.html

Lee> 8. What's the visualization support? (if any)

Rasters, graph widget (see docs, support and mailing list archives
for more)

Lee> 9. Does this program run in parallel environment?

Not currently, although the architecture of the library supports the
notion of parallelism, but no such backend currently exists (see
mailing list archives for more detailed discussions).

Lee> 10. What's included in the output?

Anything you want: Swarm is a library, not a shrinked-wrapped
application, you must implement (i.e. you need to be able to program
in a computer language) a model, which is in either Objective C or
Java, so whatever output can be produced by those languages can be
supported by Swarm.

Lee> 11. What communication protocol does it support?

Again anything you want.  See answer to 10.

Lee> 12.  Any other features I miss?

Look at docs, website, mailing list archive.

Regards,

Alex