Lookahead in parallel discrete-event simulation

Technical Report · Mon Aug 01 04:00:00 EDT 1988

OSTI ID:6316640

Fujimoto, R M

Empirical performance evaluations of parallel, discrete-event simulation algorithms using deadlock avoidance and deadlock detection and recovery techniques developed by Chandy and Misra were performed using the BBN Butterfly multiprocessor. Experiments using synthetic workloads reveal that the degree to which processes can look ahead in simulated time plays a critical role in the performance of distributed simulators using these algorithms. These results are applied to a queueing network simulation where as much as an order-of-magnitude improvement in performance is observed if the distributed simulator is programmed to fully exploit the lookahead available in the application. Performance measurements of several hypercube-based communication network simulators provide additional empirical data to support these claims. These results demonstrate that substantial improvements in performance are obtainable if the application can be programmed to have good lookahead characteristics. On the other hand, other applications inherently contain poor lookahead properties, and appear to be ill-suited for these simulation algorithms.

• Research Organization: Utah Univ., Salt Lake City (USA). Dept. of Computer Science
• OSTI ID: 6316640
• Report Number(s): AD-A-203902/2/XAB
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
990210* -- Supercomputers-- (1987-1989)
990300 -- Information Handling
ALGORITHMS
ANALOG SYSTEMS
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
DATA PROCESSING
DETECTION
DISTRIBUTED DATA PROCESSING
FUNCTIONAL MODELS
MATHEMATICAL LOGIC
NETWORK ANALYSIS
PARALLEL PROCESSING
PROCESSING
PROGRAMMING
RECOVERY
SIMULATION
SIMULATORS