Running C++ models undet the Swarm environment

Abstract

Objective-C is still the language of choice if users want to run their simulation efficiently under the Swarm environment since the Swarm environment itself was written in Objective-C. The language is a fast, object-oriented and easy to learn. However, the language is less well known than, less expressive than, and lacks support for many important features of C++ (eg. OpenMP for high performance computing application). In this paper, we present a methodology and software tools that we have developed for auto generating an Objective-C object template (and all the necessary interfacing functions) from a given C++ model, utilising the Classdesc's object description technology, so that the C++ model can both be run and accessed under the Objective-C and C++ environments. We also present a methodology for modifying an existing Swarm application to make part of the model (eg. the heatbug's step method) run under the C++ environment.