Why Hardware Matters
The hardware on which your simulation runs can change your approach to the problem and the skills you need. At the very least, using modern hardware should make your experiments go faster. During my master's program, I used an ASUS laptop for most of my modeling efforts. It was fine for most simulations, particularly when using NetLogo, but was inadequate for scaling to larger models. The 8 logical cores did, however, allow me to take advantage of NetLogo's Behavior Space to implement a type of parallelism, Single Program, Multiple Data (SPMD).