High performance distributed cluster-based individual-oriented fish school simulation

Individual-oriented simulation allows us to represent the global behavior of a system through local interaction in discrete time steps. As we face up close-to-reality models and large-scale workloads, we focus on turning from traditional approaches towards distributed simulation in order to obtain more accurate results in less time. One of the main problems in distributed simulation is how to distribute individuals efficiently through distributed architecture. Individual-oriented systems can be implemented in a distributed fashion by using either a grid-based or cluster-based approach. On one hand, grid-based approaches consist of assigning to each node a simulation space portion, together with the set of individuals currently residing in that area. On the other hand, cluster-based approaches consist of assigning to each node a fixed set of individuals. In this work we present a cluster-based method based on Voronoi diagrams and covering radius criterion in order to avoid unnecessary interaction between individuals. We can show experimentally that our proposal reduces the communication and computing times significantly increasing simulation efficiency.