A Bio-Inspired Agent Framework for Hardware Accelerated Distributed Pervasive Applications

This paper describes an agent oriented framework supporting bio-inspired mechanisms which takes profit of the intrinsic hardware parallelism of the pervasive platform developed within the Perplexus IST European project. The proposed framework is a flexible and modular means to describe and simulate complex phenomena such as biologically plausible neural networks or culture dissemination. Associated to this framework and based on the multiprocessor architecture of the Perplexus platform nodes, a tool suite capable of accelerating parallelizable agents is described. Therefore, this contribution combines the software flexibility of agent-based programming with the efficiency of multiprocessor hardware execution. This framework has been successfully tested with two experiments: a proof of concept application made of robots that autonomously improve their behaviours according to their environment and a spiking neural network simulation. These results prove that the framework and its associated methodology are relevant in the context of the simulation of complex phenomena.