From Atoms Crowd 3 users can take advantage of the interactive caching feature in Maya. In Houdini the interactive caching is already part of the standard dop caching.
You can enable the interactive caching with the shelf button: 
Once enabled, Atoms will always cache your agents at every frame. The timeline will turn green for every frame cached successfully.
As soon as the user edits any of the agent group attributes the cache will be invalidated (cached frames will turn yellow) and the user will have to play the simulation again.
The user can disable interactive caching with the shelf button: 
Both shelf buttons only take care of setting the enableCaching attribute on the tcAtomsSolver node.