4th International ICST Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques

Research Article

Distribution of Parallel Discrete-Event Simulations in GES : Core Design and Optimizations

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  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/icst.simutools.2011.245500,
        author={Silas De Munck and Kurt Vanmechelen and Jan Broeckhove},
        title={Distribution of Parallel Discrete-Event Simulations in GES : Core Design and Optimizations},
        proceedings={4th International ICST Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques},
        publisher={ICST},
        proceedings_a={SIMUTOOLS},
        year={2012},
        month={4},
        keywords={parallel distributed discrete event simulation performance analysis scalability optimization},
        doi={10.4108/icst.simutools.2011.245500}
    }
    
  • Silas De Munck
    Kurt Vanmechelen
    Jan Broeckhove
    Year: 2012
    Distribution of Parallel Discrete-Event Simulations in GES : Core Design and Optimizations
    SIMUTOOLS
    ICST
    DOI: 10.4108/icst.simutools.2011.245500
Silas De Munck1, Kurt Vanmechelen1,*, Jan Broeckhove1
  • 1: University of Antwerp
*Contact email: kurt.vanmechelen@ua.ac.be

Abstract

Computer simulations have become an indispensable tool for the empirical study of large-scale systems. The timely simulation of these systems however, is not without its challenges. Simulators have to be able to harness the full computational power of modern multi-core architectures through parallel execution and overcome the memory limitations of a single computer. In this paper we investigate techniques for distributed and parallel execution of the Grid Economics Simulator. We present the design of a parallel and distributed simulation core that uses a conservative time synchronization protocol and describe the optimizations we performed to improve the performance of the simulator. We analyze the performance of the distributed simulation setup through two different application scenarios. Our results demonstrate how the presented techniques contribute to attain significant speedups on a distributed system consisting of multi-core machines and commodity networking hardware.