Web Word of Mouth model

Prototype

version 3.7

This prototype represents the second part of D 10. It is developed by SICS. The first part is the prototype of Web Formation model (WFM). The goal of this prototype is to test our approach to build a configurable simulation environment that supports the development of large-scale simulation applications in the scale of 100K agents. We anticipate better performance and improvements in the next version. Consequently, the challenges in this version are:

Optimizing code for both performance and memory usage. This certainly has a limit, and we have to consider distributed parallel processing to cope with such large numbers. It is expected that simulations will run on multiprocessor machines or to be distributed over a cluster of machines. Therefore the design of this sequential implementation is meant to facilitate the process of parallelization.
Providing an architecture based on components. This architecture allows the configuration of a simulation application from a set of components. This is an essential requirement, not only, for experimenting with implemented models, but also for developing other simulation models. In effect, new simulation models can be developed by reusing component from implemented models.
Providing an interaction/communication channels that support the aim of making this environment flexible and open to implement new models.

In order to run the prototype in your machine you need to:

Download and install system in your machine.
Download two packages for random number generation, which are: the PRNG and the UNURAN packages
If MS Windows platform, the CYGWIN package is essential to compile the random number generation packages. See the instructions in "readme.windows" file.
Download the prototype and compile it. See the instructions in "readme.txt" file.

To understand the application architecture of the prototype, we recommend reading the following paper: Application Architecture of the Internet Simulation Model: Web Word Of Mouth (WoM)