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arXiv · 2509.24063

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

Lukas Breitwieser·Ahmad Hesam·Abdullah Giray Yağlıkçı·Mohammad Sadrosadati·Fons Rademakers·Onur Mutlu
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Abstract

Agent-based simulation is an indispensable paradigm for studying complex systems. These systems can comprise billions of agents, requiring the computing resources of multiple servers to simulate. Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art platform, BioDynaMo, does not scale out across servers due to its shared-memory-based implementation. To overcome this key limitation, we introduce TeraAgent, a distributed agent-based simulation engine. A critical challenge in distributed execution is the exchange of agent information across servers, which we identify as a major performance bottleneck. We propose two solutions: 1) a tailored serialization mechanism that allows agents to be accessed and mutated directly from the receive buffer, and 2) leveraging the iterative nature of agent-based simulations to reduce data transfer with delta encoding. Built on our solutions, TeraAgent enables extreme-scale simulations with half a trillion agents (an 84x improvement), reduces time-to-result with additional compute nodes, improves interoperability with third-party tools, and provides users with more hardware flexibility.

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Lukas Breitwieser, Ahmad Hesam, Abdullah Giray Yağlıkçı, Mohammad Sadrosadati, Fons Rademakers, Onur Mutlu. 2025-09-28. TeraAgent: A Distributed Agent-Based Simulation Engine for Simulating Half a Trillion Agents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24063

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