Crowd simulations require both rendering visually plausible images and managing the behavior of autonomous agents. Therefore, these applications need an efficient design that allow them to simultaneously tackle these two requirements. Although several proposals have focused on the software architectures for these systems, no proposals have focused on the computer systems supporting them.

In this paper, we analyze the computer architectures used in the literature to support virtual environments. Also, we propose a distributed computer architecture efficient enough to support simulations of thousand of autonomous agents. This proposal consists of a cluster of computers in order to improve flexibility and robustness, as well as a hierarchical software architecture that efficiently provides consistency. Performance evaluation results show that the trade-off between flexibility and consistency allows to effi- ciently manage thousands of autonomous agents.