Preface
The world seems to be a more and more complex place and trying to understand this complexity is a serious challenge for the future. Whether it is
the fundamental basis for life or the increasingly global nature of society, the
need to be able to model, predict and explore these phenomena is becoming
increasingly important.
Alongside the massive increases in the data that technology and society
are generating fundamental questions of,
• What do all these data mean?
• How can we understand all the interconnections that underlie the data?
• Can we model these systems and predict what they may do in the future?
• And build on this knowledge in order to understand and control our
world better?
• And create sensible policies for deciding the future?
For many types of systems, be they molecular process inside a cell or the
manifestations of economic activity, it is being realized that the old ways of
modeling and predicting their behavior are no longer useful. We can no longer
assume that a cell is a bag of randomly moving chemicals (molecules) since
the intimate interactions between individual chemicals and where in the cell
these interactions take place are of fundamental importance. Similarly, the old
assumptions that economics is based on generalized rational behavior and that
markets are inherently stable have been discredited by the recent economic
crises that have beset the world.
A new approach is needed and this is now feasible because technology
now allows for highly detailed modeling of these complex systems. This book
exemplifies one of the most successful approaches to modeling and simulating
this new generation of complex systems.
FLAME was designed to make the building of large-scale complex systems
models straightforward and the simulation code that it generates is highly
efficient and can be run on any modern technology. FLAME was the first such
platform that ran efficiently on high performance parallel computers (or HPC)
and a version for NVidia GPU-technology (Graphical Processing Unit) is also
available.
xvii
The world seems to be a more and more complex place and trying to understand this complexity is a serious challenge for the future. Whether it is
the fundamental basis for life or the increasingly global nature of society, the
need to be able to model, predict and explore these phenomena is becoming
increasingly important.
Alongside the massive increases in the data that technology and society
are generating fundamental questions of,
• What do all these data mean?
• How can we understand all the interconnections that underlie the data?
• Can we model these systems and predict what they may do in the future?
• And build on this knowledge in order to understand and control our
world better?
• And create sensible policies for deciding the future?
For many types of systems, be they molecular process inside a cell or the
manifestations of economic activity, it is being realized that the old ways of
modeling and predicting their behavior are no longer useful. We can no longer
assume that a cell is a bag of randomly moving chemicals (molecules) since
the intimate interactions between individual chemicals and where in the cell
these interactions take place are of fundamental importance. Similarly, the old
assumptions that economics is based on generalized rational behavior and that
markets are inherently stable have been discredited by the recent economic
crises that have beset the world.
A new approach is needed and this is now feasible because technology
now allows for highly detailed modeling of these complex systems. This book
exemplifies one of the most successful approaches to modeling and simulating
this new generation of complex systems.
FLAME was designed to make the building of large-scale complex systems
models straightforward and the simulation code that it generates is highly
efficient and can be run on any modern technology. FLAME was the first such
platform that ran efficiently on high performance parallel computers (or HPC)
and a version for NVidia GPU-technology (Graphical Processing Unit) is also
available.
xvii