Multi threads

[dhdang2003]

Hello guys, I'm a newbie and I have a question about GAMA platform.
Can i run one simulation faster with multi threads or anything similar like this ( parallel running,...) ?
Did GAMA platform provide a features about this ?
Sorry for my bad English.
Thanks !

[lesquoyb]

Hello,

Yes indeed you can use threads in GAMA it is present in the form of a skill that offer thread-related actions. You can find the documentation here.
However you need to understand that:

1. Threads may not improve the speed of your simulation, simply because not all problems benefits from threads, and thread manipulation itself has a cost in terms of time.
2. Using threads you may lose the reproducibility property of your simulation, so if being able to obtain exactly the same results with the same input is important for you, then threads may not be the right answer.
3. Finally threads are a bit new in gama so it's very likely that it doesn't cover all use case. That being said, if you cannot do something with the threads in gama that you should be able to do in other programming languages, please post an issue on this github and we'll try to add the missing functionalities.

So that's for threads, I think I can add so related information:

1. If you need to run multiple simulations, for example to explore the different results that you can obtain by changing a variable's value, then instead of using threads inside the simulation, it is highly recommended that you create a batch experiment. See the documentation here. Batch experiments can be run in parallel, and in that case it will entirely be managed by gama.
2. There's a not yet finished documentation about how to optimize a simulation that you can find here. But in general I would advise not to try to optimize a model if you don't already have a performance problem as it's a never ending quest that will swallow all your free time.

Hope it helps