A joint effort of
Evolutionary Computation Laboratory and
Center for Social Complexity
George Mason University
ISISLab
University of Salerno
Distributed MASON an effort to host MASON in a distributed fashion over many machines using the Message-Passing Interface (MPI). Distributed MASON can run over local clusters or cloud computing architectures (such as Amazon Web Services). A paper which describes the general system can be found in Scalability in the MASON Multi-agent System (Haoliang Wang, Ermo Wei, Robert Simon, Sean Luke, Andrew Crooks, David Freelan, and Carmine Spagnuolo). Distributed MASON is funded in party by a CRI grant from the National Science Foundation.
Distributed MASON is in a very early research-oriented prototype stage, with lots of bugs, API issues, efficiency concerns, etc. It's not for general consumption yet, but if you are a hacker we'd love some collaboration or input. Expect radical, non-backward-compatible changes to it over the next many months.
Distributed MASON is only available at our Github repository right now. Look in the contrib/distributed/ directory.
We have an early installation guide (PDF) available to understand how to build, use, and deploy Distributed MASON models.
Classdocs are also available.
If you're interested in a working, well-vetted distributed version of MASON, you should look instead to D-MASON an effort by the University of Salerno which is much further along and stable. Indeed Distributed MASON is a joint effort between the University of Salerno and GMU to develop a follow-on to D-MASON which is hosted over MPI among other things.