The DIET Agents platform has been released as Open Source. It is a
light-weight, multi-agent platform for decentralised computing. A
bottom-up design was used to ensure that the platform is lightweight,
scalable, robust, adaptive and extensible. It is especially suitable for
rapidly developing peer-to-peer prototype applications and adaptive,
distributed applications that use bottom-up or nature-inspired
techniques.

The platform is available from the DIET Agents website at
http://diet-agents.sourceforge.net. The website also provides other
resources, such as details about the design philosophy, a tutorial, API
documentation, access to mailing lists and a basic visualiser.

Agents in the platform can be thought of as small, mobile processes.
Agents have a minimal memory footprint and inter-agent communication can
be very fast. It is possible to run over 100,000 agents on an ordinary
desktop machine and there are no inherent limitations on scalability
when running applications across multiple machines. The fail-fast,
resource constrained execution of kernel functions lets systems
gracefully cope with overload and failure. Feedback provided by the
kernel enables agents to adapt to changing conditions and overload. A
high quality Object-Oriented design ensures that the code is general,
modular and extensible.

We encourage everyone to download the software, try it out and we
welcome any feedback.

Cefn Hoile, on behalf of the BT Exact DIET Agents team.
http://diet-agents.sourceforge.net