OK, now I see a clouded path to follow: use Asynchronous Steppable just for a certain time-consuming display and leave the rest GUI unchanged. Maciek -----Original Message----- From: Maciej M. Latek [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2006 12:31 PM To: 'MASON Multiagent Simulation Toolkit' Subject: Make things more parallel Hi all, I've got a question concerning parallelization of visualization inspired by parallel version of Heatbugs (which works very nicely on a Core Duo by the way, one can really see the difference) and Mr. Ong's problem. My understanding is that, as the GUI thread repaints displays, the SimState thread is put on hold. When we consider really computationally expensive GUI tasks as laying out a graphs, this seems to be suboptimal solution. I was wondering if it would be possible to put the two thread on separate processors, have the GUI thread probe the other one for information and afterwards to detach and free the SimState thread to go ahead while GUI is doing its job. After GUI is done, the process would repeat. I realize that in general I would loose synchronization, but if I'm laying something out let's say each 50 time-steps and still have to wait few second for the simulation to resume, this path would provide me with much smoother and faster performance. The questions are: 1) Is it doable? 2) Would it violate some important MASON design principle? 3) How much modification to MASON core would one have to introduce to arrive at such a solution? Regards Maciek Latek