Benefits from semi-asynchronous checkpointing for time warp simulations of a large state PCS model

Abstract

Checkpointing overhead is a major obstacle for the effectiveness of time warp parallel discrete event simulators. Semi-asynchronous checkpointing is a solution to tackle this obstacle for time warp simulations on distributed memory systems based on Myrinet. In this solution, checkpoint operations are offloaded from the host CPU and are charged to a DMA engine on board Myrinet network cards. In this paper we report an empirical evaluation of the benefits from semi-asynchronous checkpointing for time warp simulations of a large state personal communication system (PCS) model. PCS simulation models are typically characterized by high communication locality among the logical processes hosted by the same machine, therefore the hardware on board the Myrinet cards is typically underutilized if used to support exclusively communication. We show that the execution speed of time warp simulations of a large state PCS model can be increased when semi-asynchronous checkpointing is adopted.