parallel processing

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).

There are a few things from the master's degree program I think are worth sharing. To do so, I plan to go back through the courses and post some work and related code. Before I leave my thesis behind...

In December 2017 I finished all academic work necessary for a degree of Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies with a concentration in Computational Social Science at George Mason University. (Update: The degree was also awarded in December.) To finish their academic work, students are given a choice of a thesis or final project. I went with the thesis as I thought I would learn more since it was presented as a more difficult path. I was right on both counts.