Cougaar's 15,000+ Agents vs. Other

[Dimitrios Traskas]

Hi to all,

I have recently started working with Cougaar and just want to mention a few
things that I noticed over the past 3 weeks that might prove useful to other
people.

First of all I have found so far that Cougaar is a highly scalable,
efficient, robust platform that will allow a lot of developers out there to
take MAS to the next level. It is more complicated and less intuitive than
other platforms such as JADE but it delivers the goods which is what matters
in the end. Running simple benchmark tests JADE was not able to cope once
the number of Agents increased to the hundreds. Other platforms are very
inconsistent and the behaviour varies every time you will do a run.

I have built recently a simple HelloWorldPlugin test in Cougaar and I
managed to scale it up to 15,000 Agents on a single machine and a single
jvm. For me that is critical as my simulation research involves thousands of
Agents deployed on single and multiple hosts and jvms. I am sure that number
will go down once I build up my Agents with functionality but memory also
goes down day by day. At least I know I can increase the memory Cougaar
needs by just typing -Xmx8192M :).

One last thing I want to mention is java IDEs. I have found out that the
Cougaar plugins that are supposed to make your life easier can prove a pain
sometimes. Personally I like working in NetBeans mainly because it has a
superb GUI Builder. Agents can be monitored by HTTP servlets but there is
also the breed of Interface Agents who require rich user interfaces built in
Swing or other APIs. What I have found to work very well in NetBeans is to
add the Cougaar libraries manually, create the project structure required
and society files manually, follow the Cougaar tutorials religiously and
then run your society from the console window. Anyway that's it for now,
hopefully I will be back with more questions.


Thanks again to the guys from BNN for their support.

Dimitri
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