GPUAnimats—Simulating animats, an agent‐based, artificial life model on graphical processing units.

Summary: A parallel implementation of an agent‐based, artificial life model for graphical processing units (GPUs) is presented. The model represents predator‐prey populations as a collection of agents (animats) who act independently and interact with their environment and each other. Individual animat interactions include avoidance, mating, and hunting which contribute to emergent behavior in the system as a whole such as herd formation and defensive spirals. Computational simulations of the model exploring the behavior of the model are limited in size due to the large populations that may result from certain environments and rule combinations. Parallel methods for computing the model on GPUs and a CUDA implementation are presented and are shown to provide a significant performance improvement over existing sequential implementations without simplifying the model behavior. The reduced simulation run‐time can allow both larger systems to be computed and a wider range of rule combinations that may produce larger populations to be investigated in a feasible amount of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]