TeraAgent: A Distributed Agent-Based Simulation Engine for Simulating Half a Trillion Agents

Agent-based simulation is a method for studying highly complex systems in disciplines as diverse as biology, medicine, sociology, economics, finance, and more. In this method, an agent represents a small part of the system, such as a human cell, and, through interactions among many agents, the system's behavior emerges, like the growth of cancer in the human body. Real-world complex systems, such as a human organ, comprise billions of agents. However, the state-of-the-art agent-based simulation platform, BioDynaMo, does not support the distributed processing of a simulation across servers. This limitation restricts the scalability of agent counts to the computational resources available within a single server, hindering users from conducting larger and more meaningful simulations. In this paper, we introduce TeraAgent, a new distributed agent-based simulation engine. To overcome BioDynaMo's scalability limitation, TeraAgent enables efficient exchange of agent information across servers by implementing two solutions: 1) a tailored serialization mechanism that allows agents to be accessed and mutated directly at the receive buffer, and 2) delta encoding that significantly reduces data transfer across servers by leveraging the iterative nature of agent-based simulations. Built on our solutions, TeraAgent 1) enables extreme-scale simulations with half a trillion agents (292x that of BioDynaMo) on 84,096 CPU cores, 2) reduces time-to-result leveraging parallelism across compute nodes, 3) improves interoperability with third-party tools, and 4) provides users with more hardware flexibility. TeraAgent serializes agents with a median speedup of 110x (37x for deserialization) over the state-of-the-art ROOT I/O baseline, delivers 8x the agent update rate per CPU core of Biocellion, and improves in-situ visualization performance by 39x.