Quantitative assessment of an agent-based simulation on a time warp executive

We recently introduced SASSY, the design for a hybrid simulator that provides an agent-based API atop a PDES kernel (Hybinette et al. 2006). Our hypothesis is that a design like SASSY offers the advantages of an agent-based paradigm for the application developer, but also provides the performance advantages of a PDES kernel. Since the time of our initial publication, most aspects of SASSY's design have been implemented, and we are now assessing our hypotheses e.g., (He and Hybinette 2008). In this paper we investigate performance advantages for a simple agent-based application on SASSY. In most cases, agent-based simulation environments are configured using a time-step approach, where the simulation proceeds in discrete steps. In this paper we evaluate the performance of a simple application running in a traditional time-step simulation, and also its performance when running on SASSY with PDES support.