A testbed for parallel simulation performance prediction

Abstract

The overwhelming complexity of influencing factors determining the performance of parallel simulation executions demands a performance oriented development of logical process simulators. This paper presents an incremental code development process that supports early performance predictions of Time Warp protocols and several of its optimizations. A set of tools, N-MAP, for performance prediction and visualization has been developed, representing a testbed for a detailed sensitivity analysis of the various Time Warp execution parameters. As an example, the effects of various performance factors like the event structure underlying the simulation task, the average LVT progression per simulation step, the commitment rate, state saving overhead, etc. are demonstrated. We show how the scenario management features provided by the N-MAP tool can be efficiently utilized to predict performance sensitivities. For the particular example, the Time Warp protocol, though highly involved, N-MAP was able to predict the per formance sensitivity that was measured from the full implementation executing on the Meiko CS-2.