Technical Note: Evaluating Java Development Kits for Agent-Based Modeling

We present experiments assessing the performance of different Java Development Kits (JDKs) with respect to agent-based models. In our experiments, we measure the execution time of two prototypical agent-based models written in Java under different JDKs and operating systems. Our findings suggest that whereas the impact of the operating system is fairly small, the JDK in use affects performance considerably, with the most recent JDKs performing best. The results of a numerical Java benchmark computed for the same JDKs and operating systems display only a small correlation with these results. In a series of scaling experiments we examine the JDK performance along an increasing model size, again finding a competitive advantage of recent JDKs.