Figure 2

Distributed behavior of our model. Each function acting on the virtual world or on scheduling is in the "Model Swarm" class. These are virtual functions and each behavior is implemented in one of the inheriting classes. "Model Swarm Alone" contains the same functions as the "Model Swarm" class and is applied in a stand-alone use. "Model Swarm Client" and "Model Swarm Sever" are called in the case of parallelization. On the server side, a thread is created for each client and communication is done via an established communication protocol (See Additional file 1, section 4). On the client side, each client can focus on a given number of "Host" objects and a thread is created to communicate with the Server component.