HLogo: A parallel Haskell variant of NetLogo

Agent-based Modeling (ABM) has become quite popular to the simulation community for its usability and wide area of applicability. However, speed is not usually a trait that ABM tools are characterized of attaining. This paper presents HLogo, a parallel variant of the NetLogo ABM framework, that seeks to increase the performance of ABM by utilizing Software Transactional Memory and multi-core CPUs, all the while maintaining the user friendliness of NetLogo. HLogo is implemented as a Domain Specific Language embedded in the functional language Haskell, which means that it also inherits Haskell's features, such as its static typing.