Predicting the performance of multi-agent based simulation with Ethernet switched clusters

Predicting exactly the performance for distributed simulation of multi-agent based systems has considerable significance. Some investigations were realized but they usually omitted issue of communication costs between computational nodes. In this paper, we address to the communication cost models and present a model for evaluating the performance of multi-agent based simulation on Ethernet switch based networks of workstations. We validate our model by an application benchmark on random Boolean network. The experimental results demonstrate that our model performs well when the conflicts among agents are negligible.