Going Stupid with EcoLab

In 2005, Railsback et al. proposed a very simple model ({\em Stupid Model}) that could be implemented within a couple of hours, and later extended to demonstrate the use of common ABM platform functionality. They provided implementations of the model in several agent based modelling platforms, and compared the platforms for ease of implementation of this simple model, and performance. In this paper, I implement Railsback et al's Stupid Model in the EcoLab simulation platform, a C++ based modelling platform, demonstrating that it is a feasible platform for these sorts of models, and compare the performance of the implementation with Repast, Mason and Swarm versions

Linux vs. Windows in the Middle Kingdom: A Strategic Valuation Model for Platform Competition

This paper examines factors at work when an established standard competes with an open-source offering. Although the argument is often framed along price or technical features, these aspects may describe only a portion of the consumer’s adoption calculus. Modeling the consumer’s technology platform adoption decision is critical to developing market preservation for incumbents and market invasion strategies by rivals. This paper proposes a theory grounded, quantitative model for technology adoption in the presence of network effects, switching costs, and software piracy. We apply the model as a strategy development and market analysis tool to the context of the Linux market in China. A series of strategies for the new rival, as well as strategies for the incumbent, are presented. Findings from this study suggest approaches not only for the context at hand, but also for other scenarios where open-source, network effects, software piracy, and extreme income variances exist

Event-driven industrial robot control architecture for the Adept V+ platform

Modern industrial robotic systems are highly interconnected. They operate in a distributed environment and communicate with sensors, computer vision systems, mechatronic devices, and computational components. On the fundamental level, communication and coordination between all parties in such distributed system are characterized by discrete event behavior. The latter is largely attributed to the specifics of communication over the network, which, in terms, facilitates asynchronous programming and explicit event handling. In addition, on the conceptual level, events are an important building block for realizing reactivity and coordination. Eventdriven architecture has manifested its effectiveness for building loosely-coupled systems based on publish-subscribe middleware, either general-purpose or robotic-oriented. Despite all the advances in middleware, industrial robots remain difficult to program in context of distributed systems, to a large extent due to the limitation of the native robot platforms. This paper proposes an architecture for flexible event-based control of industrial robots based on the Adept V+ platform. The architecture is based on the robot controller providing a TCP/IP server and a collection of robot skills, and a high-level control module deployed to a dedicated computing device. The control module possesses bidirectional communication with the robot controller and publish/subscribe messaging with external systems. It is programmed in asynchronous style using pyadept, a Python library based on Python coroutines, AsyncIO event loop and ZeroMQ middleware. The proposed solution facilitates integration of Adept robots into distributed environments and building more flexible robotic solutions with eventbased logic

UPC++ v1.0 Programmer’s Guide, Revision 2020.3.0

UPC++ is a C++11 library that provides Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. It is designed for writing parallel programs that run efficiently and scale well on distributed-memory parallel computers. The PGAS model is single program, multiple-data (SPMD), with each separate constituent process having access to local memory as it would in C++. However, PGAS also provides access to a global address space, which is allocated in shared segments that are distributed over the processes. UPC++ provides numerous methods for accessing and using global memory. In UPC++, all operations that access remote memory are explicit, which encourages programmers to be aware of the cost of communication and data movement. Moreover, all remote-memory access operations are by default asynchronous, to enable programmers to write code that scales well even on hundreds of thousands of cores