A tutorial on Cloud computing for Agent-based Modeling & Simulation with Repast

Cloud computing facilitates access to elastic high performance computing without the associated high cost. Agent-based Modeling & Simulation (ABMS) is being used across many scientific disciplines to study complex adaptive systems. Repast Simphony (Recursive Porous Agent Simulation Toolkit) is a widely used ABMS system. Cloud computing can speed-up significantly ABMS to facilitate more accurate and faster results, timely experimentation, and optimization. However, the many different Clouds, Cloud middleware and Service approaches make the development of Cloud-based ABMS highly complex. This tutorial introduces the CloudSME Simulation Platform (CSSP) that enables simulation software to be deployed as service (SaaS) supported by a cloud platform (PaaS). It shows how Repast can be deployed as a cloud computing service as part of a workflow of tasks. A case study demonstrates how the CSSP can easily run agent-based simulations written in Repast on multiple Clouds.