Design and Performance Evaluation of a Conservative Parallel Discrete Event Core for GES

The empirical study of large-scale distributed systems often calls for the use of computer simulations as real-world experimentation is too costly or simply infeasible. Computer simulations can also provide results on a much shorter timespan, increasing productivity. Nevertheless, large-scale system simulation can prove to be non-responsive on modern computers, especially when the modeled system has a high level of complexity or when detailed and compute intensive models are used. In order to fully harness the computational power of modern multi-core computer architectures, computer simulations need to execute in a parallel fashion. In this paper we investigate the potential of parallelizing the execution of the Grid Economics Simulator (GES), a Java-based discrete-event simulator that is targeted towards the simulation of distributed systems in general, and economic forms of resource management in grids in particular. We present the design of a parallel continuation-based simulation core that uses a conservative time synchronization protocol. We analyze the performance of the parallel simulation core through synthetic benchmarks. The results of our performance evaluation give a clear insight in the impact of simulation model properties such as event arrival rates, computational workload, remoteness of events, and look-ahead size, on the speedup that can be achieved through parallel execution.