Does NetLogo take advantage of multiple processors?
Not for a single model run, no. The NetLogo engine is single threaded and we expect it to remain so. You can take advantage of multiple processors to do multiple model runs concurrently, though, in either of two ways: • By having multiple copies of NetLogo open, in separate Java virtual machines; see this answer for instructions. • By writing Java code that uses the Controlling API to do “headless” model runs from the command line. This is currently the only possible way to do multiple concurrent model runs within a single Java virtual machine. See the “Controlling” section of the User Manual. In a future version of NetLogo, we hope to improve the support for multiple processors as follows: • Allow multiple models to be open simultaneously, each running in a different thread and hence on a different processor.
