Parallelisation and Python
Having built our model, we now want to run it. Give it a go. You should see it very rapidly (within one iteration usually!) distributes the agents. If you want, make the agents move more realistically (i.e. one random step at a time – just remember the boundary issues). The other thing to try is altering the code some you can see the number of nodes being used and which is processing in which order by printing the node variable.
Finally, although we don't have a Beowulf cluster any more, they are still useful to know about, not least because a lot of them are built into grid and cloud systems. With this in mind, we thought you might be interested in comparing running this with running stuff on a Beowulf cluster, so I've saved our old Beowulf Java instructions for you. Although you can't use them, if you read through them they're give you a flavour of how this stuff works on Linux, and using a MPI implementation that demands a C-based MPI implementation to run under it: Beowulf instructions.
If, for your dissertation, you want to make a model that requires HPC, we can get you access to a Grid system; just talk to Andy or Nick (more likely Nick, who is the grid and Amazon cloud king!).