Dynamic load balancing of a multi-cluster simulator on a network of workstations

Abstract

Performance of Time Warp simulation systems are often measured on exclusively available parallel computing resources. In distributed systems exclusive use is normally not feasible. Instead, due to the multi-tasking operating systems, many users share the workstations and their availability for parallel simulation purposes varies extensively. Time Warp has been found to be very sensitive to variations in available processing power. This paper presents two methods for a Time Warp VLSI simulation system to reduce the negative effect of a non-ideal environment on the execution of parallel simulations. A dynamic load balancing algorithm which adapts to the change of available processing power is presented. This mechanism, together with a multi-cluster partitioning technique significantly improve the performance of Time Warp based simulation systems on heterogeneous computing resource.